When I was in high school our amateur jazz band went into a recording studio to make a fun keepsake album. My memory is fairly hazy, but the whole experience was a lot of fun! Everybody got their microphones and a headset. Maybe we recorded by sections and likely with a metronome track.
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.
When I've talked to people about modern music in the past, it's only ever people who play music, or who have an intense interest in it, that seem to even be aware that the vast majority of modern music is autotuned (and "gridified" as this author puts it).
Man fuck that. Audio engineers lost their minds snapping all these live performances. One thing to make dance music on the grid but a live high school band?
Some artists would consider the gridified recording as what they strive to achieve in practice.
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.
Something seems strange about this publication. They're doing a lot of talking about machine perfection in music, but some of the articles have big chunks that read as 100% AI on Pangram, mainly “The Shame Machine” which is itself primarily about generative AI. However, I didn't observe that in the OP here, nor on the most recent post “The Climate Crisis Has A Music Problem”. Was that an early approach that's since been abandoned, or what? And then the rest… clearly they have a thesis they want to keep harping on, and as someone with musical experience I'm empathetic with what seems to be the main throughline of it, but the Substack as a whole reads as being heavy propaganda for their particular certification, which is a scammy feel.
> It is because modern music production now treats human temporal particularity as error in need of correction.
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.
I just find a lot of modern music... boring. It feels perfect but just isn't interesting.
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.
I remember in the late 00s when making fun of autotune was a common joke, and a way to attack "bad" or "lazy" singers / musicians. Probably just because some bands were using it stylistically (T-Pain most notoriously).
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.
The analysis is interesting, but I think the premise that human error is a defect to be corrected is flawed in that bands have consistently always strived to play in time together. Humans tolerate a certain amount of variance, and may even like it, but if you have a drummer who can't keep time, you don't have a band. Big Band music made it a spectacle of keeping so many instruments in time and tune with each other.
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.
I don't think we are talking being able to keep time, that is a given for any musician playing to be recorded.
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.
> the kick and bass do not line up exactly. You never hear that in a contemporary pop mix anymore. That is not because musicians lost the ability to play together.
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.
Looks like a standard editing mistake to me. The previous sentence probably used to say something like ‘musicians used to not be able to play together’ but when it was edited the editor forgot to update the next sentence for coherence. Editing long-form text is hard :)
>Why would losing the ability to play together cause the kick and bass to line up?
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.
I've always found stuff about how technological/sociological advances beget changes in music really interesting. David Byrne's book 'How Music Works' covers this exact point about quantisation and much more.
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.
Beautiful use of sound analysis tooling, and pretty much incontrovertible evidence. Love it! Maybe that's the thing that makes most pop songs completely uninteresting to me. It just makes me want to go watch live music even more.
It's definitely extreme these days but it's been going on for quite a long time. Apart from live music, I really enjoy some recordings which were raw and largely untouched. Lilywhite Sessions is a perfect example (the original unmastered leak), and there are some really cool rehearsal tapes from Deep Purple floating around. I wish I could get the "as it was recorded" versions of some modern albums.
A great book tangential to this subject matter is Jaron Lanier's "you are not a gadget" which spends a substantial amount of time on the development of music in parallel to computers. My recollection is that midi basically became the dominant format because it was first, and it was first because it was more or less the most obvious way to represent music in a simple programmable format. Other formats that allow for more flexibility didn't crack through due to the critical mass of adoption of midi, so it persisted until today.
That tempo analysis graph is cool to see, showing the subtle fluctuation of "local tempo", rushing or leaning back intentionally. It's a sophisticated technique though, and I bet outside of pop music, like jazz musicians - especially drummers - still know how to do it; and seasoned listeners also know how to feel and appreciate it.
I've been wondering if we're going to end up with some kind of backlash against all the autotuning, 'gridification' as this article explains, etc etc., and AI slop as well as deepfakes filling up the interwebs. You can't know what's real anymore. So people will start preferring live performances. Not only live music, but, say, theater/musicals/opera instead of going to the movies, and so forth?
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?
The entire premise of this essay rests on the idea that musical performances are necessarily played live (particularly, with a live drummer), in the tradition of rock music. This just qualitatively does not apply to much modern music, where drums are played by a machine or computer. Top on the '2025' list is two good examples from totally different genres: Kendrick Lamar (hip hop), and Billie Eilish (vocal-forward electronica).
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.
I agree purely looking at tempo variation isn't everything, but I think perhaps "Zero tempo variation is a necessary but not sufficient indicator of "gridifcation" is closer to the message?
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.
>The entire premise of this essay rests on the idea that musical performances are necessarily played live (particularly, with a live drummer), in the tradition of rock music. This just qualitatively does not apply to much modern music, where drums are played by a machine or computer
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?
I didn't feel like the article is being in any way judgemental of music created using perfect digital instruments. The author seems to be only against over-correcting human performances. So it was about all of the new ones being on the grid, rather than about each of them.
> And what about dance music? Isn’t that entirely gridified? No. Not by the definition being used by the Musical Form Institute.
>
> What!?
>
> The next essay will cover dance music.
>
> To recap: gridification is not playing to a timing reference. It is correcting human performances to a fixed grid after the fact.
I felt that the essay acknowledged differences in production between genres. Tempo is used as the main example, but they also mention vocal tuning as an example of gridification.
> What modern production calls “correction,” and mistakes for care, is really a form of epistemic violence against the record of human beings objectifying felt time for our understanding.
I hope this was written as tongue in cheek, otherwise wow, you are taking yourself too seriously.
Perfection is artificial; to err is human. I think people will appreciate these things more as they become saturated by AI art.
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 I was in high school our amateur jazz band went into a recording studio to make a fun keepsake album. My memory is fairly hazy, but the whole experience was a lot of fun! Everybody got their microphones and a headset. Maybe we recorded by sections and likely with a metronome track.
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.
When I've talked to people about modern music in the past, it's only ever people who play music, or who have an intense interest in it, that seem to even be aware that the vast majority of modern music is autotuned (and "gridified" as this author puts it).
Man fuck that. Audio engineers lost their minds snapping all these live performances. One thing to make dance music on the grid but a live high school band?
Some artists would consider the gridified recording as what they strive to achieve in practice.
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.
Something seems strange about this publication. They're doing a lot of talking about machine perfection in music, but some of the articles have big chunks that read as 100% AI on Pangram, mainly “The Shame Machine” which is itself primarily about generative AI. However, I didn't observe that in the OP here, nor on the most recent post “The Climate Crisis Has A Music Problem”. Was that an early approach that's since been abandoned, or what? And then the rest… clearly they have a thesis they want to keep harping on, and as someone with musical experience I'm empathetic with what seems to be the main throughline of it, but the Substack as a whole reads as being heavy propaganda for their particular certification, which is a scammy feel.
> It is because modern music production now treats human temporal particularity as error in need of correction.
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.
I just find a lot of modern music... boring. It feels perfect but just isn't interesting.
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.
I remember in the late 00s when making fun of autotune was a common joke, and a way to attack "bad" or "lazy" singers / musicians. Probably just because some bands were using it stylistically (T-Pain most notoriously).
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.
The analysis is interesting, but I think the premise that human error is a defect to be corrected is flawed in that bands have consistently always strived to play in time together. Humans tolerate a certain amount of variance, and may even like it, but if you have a drummer who can't keep time, you don't have a band. Big Band music made it a spectacle of keeping so many instruments in time and tune with each other.
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.
I don't think we are talking being able to keep time, that is a given for any musician playing to be recorded.
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.
> the kick and bass do not line up exactly. You never hear that in a contemporary pop mix anymore. That is not because musicians lost the ability to play together.
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.
Looks like a standard editing mistake to me. The previous sentence probably used to say something like ‘musicians used to not be able to play together’ but when it was edited the editor forgot to update the next sentence for coherence. Editing long-form text is hard :)
>Why would losing the ability to play together cause the kick and bass to line up?
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.
That is a weird phrase.
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.
That's how I read it: "lost the ability to play together" -> "tracks recorded individually to clicks and perfected before mixing".
I've always found stuff about how technological/sociological advances beget changes in music really interesting. David Byrne's book 'How Music Works' covers this exact point about quantisation and much more.
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.
Beautiful use of sound analysis tooling, and pretty much incontrovertible evidence. Love it! Maybe that's the thing that makes most pop songs completely uninteresting to me. It just makes me want to go watch live music even more.
Support your local bands!
Live music is the best!
Yeah I love the connection with the artist and the crowd you feel with small venues
It's definitely extreme these days but it's been going on for quite a long time. Apart from live music, I really enjoy some recordings which were raw and largely untouched. Lilywhite Sessions is a perfect example (the original unmastered leak), and there are some really cool rehearsal tapes from Deep Purple floating around. I wish I could get the "as it was recorded" versions of some modern albums.
A great book tangential to this subject matter is Jaron Lanier's "you are not a gadget" which spends a substantial amount of time on the development of music in parallel to computers. My recollection is that midi basically became the dominant format because it was first, and it was first because it was more or less the most obvious way to represent music in a simple programmable format. Other formats that allow for more flexibility didn't crack through due to the critical mass of adoption of midi, so it persisted until today.
That tempo analysis graph is cool to see, showing the subtle fluctuation of "local tempo", rushing or leaning back intentionally. It's a sophisticated technique though, and I bet outside of pop music, like jazz musicians - especially drummers - still know how to do it; and seasoned listeners also know how to feel and appreciate it.
I've been wondering if we're going to end up with some kind of backlash against all the autotuning, 'gridification' as this article explains, etc etc., and AI slop as well as deepfakes filling up the interwebs. You can't know what's real anymore. So people will start preferring live performances. Not only live music, but, say, theater/musicals/opera instead of going to the movies, and so forth?
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?
It's not just pop music. This plague has infested metal and it's unbearable.
The entire premise of this essay rests on the idea that musical performances are necessarily played live (particularly, with a live drummer), in the tradition of rock music. This just qualitatively does not apply to much modern music, where drums are played by a machine or computer. Top on the '2025' list is two good examples from totally different genres: Kendrick Lamar (hip hop), and Billie Eilish (vocal-forward electronica).
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.
I agree purely looking at tempo variation isn't everything, but I think perhaps "Zero tempo variation is a necessary but not sufficient indicator of "gridifcation" is closer to the message?
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.
>The entire premise of this essay rests on the idea that musical performances are necessarily played live (particularly, with a live drummer), in the tradition of rock music. This just qualitatively does not apply to much modern music, where drums are played by a machine or computer
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.
Their follow up piece on dance music explains their idea a bit better and how it relates to drum machines and sequencers.
https://musicalform.substack.com/p/why-dance-music-is-not-gr...
I didn't feel like the article is being in any way judgemental of music created using perfect digital instruments. The author seems to be only against over-correcting human performances. So it was about all of the new ones being on the grid, rather than about each of them.
I mean the author specifically called that they weren't talking about that.
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.
> And what about dance music? Isn’t that entirely gridified? No. Not by the definition being used by the Musical Form Institute. > > What!? > > The next essay will cover dance music. > > To recap: gridification is not playing to a timing reference. It is correcting human performances to a fixed grid after the fact. I felt that the essay acknowledged differences in production between genres. Tempo is used as the main example, but they also mention vocal tuning as an example of gridification.
An essay against correcting human error, with an uncorrected human error in the title. Feels like the most on-brand typo possible.
> What modern production calls “correction,” and mistakes for care, is really a form of epistemic violence against the record of human beings objectifying felt time for our understanding.
I hope this was written as tongue in cheek, otherwise wow, you are taking yourself too seriously.
> It is a presentational symbol through which forms of felt life become publicly perceptible.
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?
Perfection is artificial; to err is human. I think people will appreciate these things more as they become saturated by AI art.
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.
this discussion is missing the concept of microtiming