Remember, machines don’t kill music, people do—and quantization is one of the main weapons. ... Quantizing everything is the quickest way to suck the life out of a piece of music.
https://docs.native-instruments.com/pdf-guides/Battery_3_Man...
I would argue that there's probably a lot more nuance here when you look at how economics of music have changed in the last 50 years - it's now so much cheaper and easier to produce and listen to music. There are millions of bedroom producers experimenting with production techniques, and the market for music is completely saturated with more good music than anyone could possible listen to. Record labels just can't compete when it comes to making interesting, creative music, however they can still win at marketing. I think the modern charts now are less determined by what resonated well with audiences, but rather what has been calculated to be the most 'marketable' kind of music, and I suppose a metronomic tempo is an easier sell in this regard.
Also worth noting: a perfect tempo makes a song a lot easier to remix, which can often gain the song a lot more exposure than the original edit.
In contrast, when I check out older music from less successful musicians, it's often very imperfect; both in that it's boring, but in that there's little talent there.
Or, to translate: Gridification is modern style that doesn't make up for lack of talent; and ironically masks the talent that used to be there.
Related: I suggest checking out some of the newer Lemon Twigs albums. They're decent songwriters and excellent musicians. They went 100% analog on their most recent album, which I initially thought was a gimmick, until I read this article.
> Something happened to recorded music over the last twenty-five years that most people can hear, and feel, but almost nobody has the language for.
That is 100% Claude
I was thinking about this the other day as I was playing guitar adding slight pauses and swings to what I was playing. The imperfection makes things so much more interesting and fun imo.
Why would losing the ability to play together cause the kick and bass to line up? This is the most forced claudism I've seen in a long time.
Because if they lost the ability to play together, then they would be forced to either overdub tracks played individually with a click track, OR use midi, in both of which cases the kick and bass typically lines up.
So what this say, is we get this exact "perfect line up" now, but not because musicians lost the ability to play together and sound naturally, but because we prefer these other two production techniques and audio processing that removes all natural nuance.
I can only make sense of it as "musicians are so bad at playing together that we don't try". If say the bass player cannot play with others I'm going to record them playing each chord/note in isolation, and then use that as midi samples to track. Do that to everything and you get perfectly lined up music. If you can play together "good enough" then I'm not going to do that.
With that said, a silver lining of AI learning to imitate mainstream producers is that the (big players of the) music industry may finally lose their grip on people's musical taste. Maybe people will start searching for alternative styles, and going to their (minor artists with a unique voice) performances in person.
But also, a perfected, highly produced sound is part of the aesthetic values of modern popular music. So producers who do it now aren’t necessarily wrong, either. They’re just following taste. If people start loving a loosey goosey White Stripes sound again, producers will go back to leaving it in.
Support your local bands!
It was around the same time there was a backlash against the (rather egregious) use of Photoshop in advertising. But for better or worse, in both cases, the use of these and similar tools have become ubiquitous, just in a way that's more subtle.
Nowadays, hearing a band that isn't pitch corrected and quantized to all hell is refreshing, similar to seeing an actor with imperfect teeth. It feels like, for probably a whole host of reasons, almost every art form has been trending toward removing all the imperfections that make human art feel "human" and interesting. I don't expect this will get better now that we have AI.
I think the thing that has changed is that the tools to "fix" the bugs are better and more commoditized, so they're used more. And similarly, production costs have gone down as hardware is commoditized, so there's more music to choose from. The last piece is that social media has made it popular to all like the same thing and make dance videos to the same songs, so already perfect little pop pieces climb up faster.
What the article is talking about is the teeny tiny imperfections of hitting the notes/drums at the beat (or "grid").
I agree that the imperfections are overfixed to an inhuman level.
Interestingly, there is a "swing" or randomize feature available in some hardware and I guess in every DAW, so if the producers wanted, they would be able to "fix" the notes to a grid, and then add a perfectly calculated random touch to make it sound human.
But yep, for the chorus, the offset is definitely deliberate since it's glaring and repeated every time.
Listening to the lyrics, they're clearly making a heartbeat :)
Social media definitely didn't invent this. I'm not overly familiar with what is popular on social media, but it seems like the internet has greatly expanded the viability of different styles and niche music. When I get together with friends, we all have tons of music than most of us haven't heard before.
"tight" big band music "in the pocket" is deliberately and consistently behind the beat.
Peggy Lee and other great singers are more in tune than auto-tune or any perfectly tuned instrument is. Modern tuning, aka equal temperament, is a compromise. Every key is perfectly identically subtly out of tune. A great singer will sing with natural tuning, adjusted on the fly for each key change. Peggy Lee would sing a third slightly flatter than an auto-tune will. Unless an instrument is also playing the third, in which case she would sing in unison with the instrument.
Most of us aren't Peggy Lee or the incredible studio musicians that came out of New Orleans. We need to learn the rules before we can break them.
The software had a quantization feature which he showed us how to use but he warned us not to use it on everything, because it makes music sound mechanical and less human. I guess that philosophy did not survive in the music industry.
Some artists would gridify recording so people who come to their concerts enjoy their plays with "errors" on purpose.
As humans, we don't want to be seen what we spent our entire life to be considered err'ed. I understand the pitcher perfectness in that regard, though I'd still like unpolished "rock/metal" music.
Now I can only enjoy those raw moments in concerts.
Are electronica and hip hop worse for this? I suppose that's up for debate - but we now have multiple full generations of music listeners and critics who obviously, passionately love those genres, and they've been growing for decades. This is easy to see not just via charts but online discourse and the zeitgeist.
Do those genres 'groove' worse and feel less human? This is more subjective, and more debatable, but I would argue that hip hop has redefined what 'groove' can even mean, with its very off-the-grid, loose feel despite the technically very precise machine looping the beats (because producers nudge each beat off the grid, usually in very intentional ways, or play the beat in live then adjust it). And it's hard to argue that electronic dance music in its many forms hasn't made people move and connect with the music's rhythm in powerful ways, despite almost complete quantization in most dimensions.
I think purely looking at tempo stddev and not much else papers over these aspects a little much.
More specifically, they define gridification as: recording multiple takes, nudging every single note onto the grid for each one, then selecting the best take section by section (however small those sections are) so that every single note is absolutely perfectly on time, in tune etc, loses... something - it removes some of the humanity. The author also explicitly cites many other kinds of recording and editing as NOT gridification - e.g. playing to a click, using a drum machine.
One could say modern music is not "musical performances" then. A sequencer or drum maching playing isn't "a performance", it's a programmed loop.
>Do those genres 'groove' worse and feel less human?
Yes.
When I play the drum machine, I program it live. I never play the same thing twice. It IS a performance. It applies for both vintage drum machines (such as E-mu drumulator or tr808) and new gen ones or grooveboxes (such as Electribes or Octatracks).
The drum machine is not all of the performance. In pop you'll have at the very least a singer. Even if all of the instrumental is machine-made, having a live singer definitely makes it a "performance".
https://musicalform.substack.com/p/why-dance-music-is-not-gr...
They're comparing the tempo deviation not just in the drums but in literally everything.
Billie Eilish may be singing over a drum machine rather than a live drummer but that wouldn't make _her_ perfectly on time.
When I hear a drum machine execute with microsecond level precision, I feel like I want to throw my computer through a window. It is instantaneous revulsion. There isn't a ponderous "gee I wonder if this is real/fake" phase of discovery. It's obviously fake and trash. Immediately. Every time.
Orchestral arrangements done the same way might be the only thing that is worse to my ear.
There are situations where having good timing is important, but you cannot put the entire thing on an atomic clock and call it "art".
Not saying this as some kind of general "anti-AI" argument or anything. I'm not advocating for the Butlerian Jihad. I find AI a very useful tool, and I used it at work pretty much every day. But for art, which in a sense is a celebration of human creativity, something gets lost if we use AI to generate it, doesn't it?
I hope this was written as tongue in cheek, otherwise wow, you are taking yourself too seriously.
It is utterly baffling to me that this is a thing someone felt needed expressing. Surely, intuitively knowing this is part of being human?
How else do we explain the blues, love songs... anything?
What I want to know is what the author thinks of drum machines, with their mechanical perfection. Roland's very first product, the TR-77 drum machine, was released in 1972, in time for his 1975 comparison. They have been popular ever since.
When we finished we got to go watch the sound guys at work. They meticulously gridified and autotuned every note. After it was all over I got the cd, I listened to my favorite tracks that I got to spend the semester playing with my friends, and it had no resemblance to what I knew our group to be. I think I threw the album away.
It's like a non-cook not realising the role of MSG in a dish: despite the lack of awareness, they wouldn't enjoy the dish as much without the MSG
https://www.instagram.com/reels/C9h9xpNOoEN/