What Is Gridifcation

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.

Man, the '75 hit just grabs me from the very first note. The funky rhythm does keeps you on your toes, those fun synthy parps... everything is just so much more compelling, more human, more catchy. Apart from anything else, the Mars-Gaga thing sounds mushy in comparison.

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’m a lifelong musician and producer who has been experimenting a lot with Suno for music creation this year.

It’s been interesting to notice that Suno-generated tracks have all kinds of subtle tempo drift, and the tempo maps look very similar to the irregularities shown in the article, at least from a numerical perspective. I have actually spent a lot of time quantizing AI-generated tracks to the grid (to aid chopping/editing), even creating automations that do it for me now when I ingest Suno tracks into Ableton for follow-up production work.

Unknown to me whether this is A) an emergent “imperfection” fundamental to the model and its training dataset, or B) something Suno intentionally injects to “humanize” their output, but knowing that low-effort Suno-generated tracks are currently flooding music distributors, I think it’s ironic that the same factor the author describes as exemplifying the very humanity of recorded music may also be one of the biggest tells that a song was AI-generated, for music being released today.

> 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.

> 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'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.

Battery 3 from Native Instruments is a drum sampler from around 2013. This is in the manual:

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...

That's partially why Burial's first album brought such a fresh air to the music scene. He didn't use a DAW, but a plain, boring audio editor Sony Sound Forge and adjusted his samples until the groove and the tones felt right.

I've also seen produces complain that the default BPM is 120 so they start there and later realize that it should have been changed. Minor annoyance, but it reveals the importance of defaults.

I bet the same is happening with writing, at least with technical and academic. Automated grammar checkers and AI correctors bland the language by enforcing strict grammar. Whereas a slight departure from standard grammar and punctuation is something that could give writing character and personality.

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.

Often I get a lot more out of some YouTuber/streamers's slightly scuffed cover of a song than the original studio recording. "Perfect" music often makes me feel nothing. It's the tiny individual mistakes and flourishes that make it easier to relate to the performer and music as a human - and that's what puts a smile on my face listening to it.

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!

I watched the other day Rick Beato's "What If Stairway To Heaven Came Out Today?" and what stroke me is that his granddaughter remarked that the song didn't have auto-tune. First, she has great musical ear. Second, she destroyed my illusion that "true" musical producers were in the business of zapping the singer whenever they went out of tune, not of using auto-tune, which is something more becoming of the plebeian musicians who make songs from their bedroom.

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.

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.

When I was in highschool in the 90s, our school spent a ton of money on a set of midi keyboards hooked up to workstations, new technology at the time, and offered a class on digital music production. Our teacher was the school music director and I remember he was really excited.

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.

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.

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 a dubious meta joke for that specific article, 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.

An essay against correcting human error, with an uncorrected human error in the title. Feels like the most on-brand typo possible.

Maybe controversial, but this is why I don't like live performances. If tickets were cheap, maybe, but paying a high price to hear a mediocre reproduction of the digital copy I already have is a pass for me.

I literally do not care that someone can "hit high notes" or that "unlike this other artist, my favorite artist can actually sing." I'm listening to music, not grading music class students.

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.

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.

Well shoot, I snap-to-grid because while I make music that I love[1], my actual playing skills and timekeeping are poor -- I'm always a bit fast, hitting notes before the beat, even with a click track -- and without either automatic quantification or at least the ability to edit the timing to be more reasonable in post, my tracks would be worse.

Where in the binary between "you're a real musician who uses human feel/timing to create art" OR "you're a hopeless commercial grifter chasing perfection" do I fall?

[1] I hope all musicians feel this way

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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

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> What hits me immediately is how perfect the vocals are. There are melodic leaps in the verse that are incredibly difficult to nail, and Bruno Mars is hitting every single note pitch-perfect and in absolutely perfect time.

Isn't every song recorded as every word singularly at a certain pitch? And timing done completely in the DAW instead of while recording.

Barely was singing when a friend of mine did ``professional'' recording, and had to know each pitch of a song to perfection, since no overlap was ever sung.