Comment by jrajav
5 hours ago
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.
Drum machines are instruments. Even if sequenced, drum machines are live instruments and they require skill. It requires time to master. It's not only "programmed loop".
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).
>Drum machines are instruments. Even if sequenced, drum machines are live instruments and they require skill.
Only if played live via it's pads or hooked to MIDI drum triggers.
If it's sequenced from some computer program like Logic or through step input, then it's not used as a "live instrument".
>I never play the same thing twice
99% of tracks however do. Are we discussing what rarely happens, or what's the most typical case in pop music, what TFA covers?
On top of that, not all drum machines are created equal. There are whole genres based on 808s, 909s, 303s combined with these… using DINsync, which involves retriggering internal hardware clocks on the machines at trigger rise-time speed. rather than sending a succession of MIDI notes. That stuff is still 'electronic clocks' but not in the sense of 'lives on a computer that triggers notes', in the sense of 'sequencers firing notes very simultaneously'.
That's a timing lock that's tighter than the usual sort in recent generations. There are DAWs (Renoise) that pride themselves on being able to send MIDI with less slop and irregularity (nice trick since MIDI is a serial bus, but you'd think it'd be more common to get right). There are whole genres (see: psytrance) that do very well in trackers which can fire sample-accurate notes simultaneously without resorting to MIDI.
Even though it's of the machine, the groove of an 808/303 pair synced by DINsync is a different beast from 'snap to grid and autotune'. There's subtleties to everything.
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> 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.
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".
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.