alt Hacker NewsWhat Is Gridifcation
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Famous studio and touring bassist Lee Sklar has a great youtube channel [1] where he tells war stories and plays along to a few of the thousands of songs he has recorded on over the past 50 years.
In one (which I can't find) he mentions a Japanese musician coming to LA to record with the top LA studio guys. It is very common to play to a click track, and one song just wasn't gelling. The studio guys said, "Let's try it one time without the click track." The Japanese musician said, "We're allowed to do that?" Anyway, they went ahead and the song came to life. The musician literally cried after because it felt so good to not be focused on tracking the click instead of being in the moment making music with a bunch of other humans.
This is partly (or perhaps even rather significantly) due to the relatively new (say, 20-30 years) distributed aspects of music production.
In the 1970s, you began to see the emergence of the drummer "playing to the click" and the main motivation behind this was that some number of the rest of the performers were not in the room and/or not recording at the same time as the drummer. If you let the drummer just do their human thing, the timing will wander a bit in ways that are hard to follow and respond to if you were not in the room. So producers and engineers began to use click tracks to ensure that now matter when/where the differ performers actually recorded their work, everyone would be locked together.
If you record all together in a single space at a single time, you generally don't need this (unless the musicians are not very good and the drummer still wanders a lot).
So it's a phenomenon that didn't begin with DAWs and computers - that technology just took the overall approach even further.
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'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...
> 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.
Donald Fagen is/was well known for doing take after take after take when recording looking for what he found perfect. He would sample notes, replace notes, replace drums and cut and paste until he made the mix he wanted. I was in the music software/hardware industry at the time and the Wendel and Wendel Jr. computers/samplers/drum replacers along with Garfield Doctor Click rhythm controllers were heavily used. I am sure he also did a ton of old school punch in/out and used other mechanisms to get things just the way he wanted.
The point I am trying to make is that the processes that used to take a maniacal amount of time, resources and attention to detail can now be done quickly and automatically. Does Steely Dan's Aja sound better or worse than a modern album produced using modern techniques?
This comes down to taste and who am I to determine what someone else finds appealing in their music? Producers have been "producing" songs and moving them from their originally recorded state into something entirely different for decades.
I personally miss singers being slightly out of tune and beats being slight out of time in songs. I love hearing imperfections in older music. But, would Trevor Horn have pulled some of the singers he produced back into tune before pressing the vinyl? Someone should ask him. I am inclined to say yes.
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.
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.
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 dabble in creating mashups from time to time [1] and I see that first hand. One of my first was built around Let's Groove by Earth Wind and Fire. As a funk act, they are as tight as a group of musicians can ever hope to get, and still, the tempo would subtly speed up and down from bar to bar.
It makes things much more challenging to sync up! You can't just speed up the slower song (or vice versa), because even if the averages match, it will still be all over the place from bar to bar. I now have much better workflows to deal with this, but for that first one, I spent a looong time manually adjusting things to get them to fit.
Working with tracks that were recorded to a click (or digitally gridified, as per the article), are much easier to work with. Match the tempos and everything automatically works. Definitely helps creating my mashups...
But I do agree with the post, in that it loses some indescribable human aspect. I love the push and pull of musicians trying to follow each other rather than concentrating on the click. Or even just pushing and pulling against oneself with things like rubato in classical music, sometimes accelerating, and sometimes slowing, at times almost to a dead stop, so as to build a sense of antecip.... pation.
[1] Link if anyone is interested in checking it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP74tMiXBU8&list=PLsj2XVeWwU...
> 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.
Excellent writing. I know nothing of this space, but this is so engaging.
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.
An essay against correcting human error, with an uncorrected human error in the title. Feels like the most on-brand typo possible.
How did we even get here? MIDI sequencing for rhythm tracks goes back over forty years now. Already in the 1980s there was a reaction against overly precise electronic timing and an interest in "humanizing" the groove. Solutions did appear. Why don't they see more use? Or maybe they do see plenty of use, except that then listeners assume it's musicians playing. As long as any significant fraction of music is naively quantized, there is something to complain about.
One observation I have, by the way, on a related note, that I've heard some AI-generated vocals which blew autotuned humans out of the water. Oopsies, eh?
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.
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.
I've been recording myself at home for many years (I write songs on guitar and sing, and some other instruments), and this really resonates with me.
When I sing and play guitar at the same time (which creates recording challenges with mic bleed and phase cancellation), and especially without a click track, there is an undeniable difference and there is magic in that difference. But the perfectionist in me wants to present a polished recording, so I end up "comping" (recording many times and picking the "best" bits), using a metronome, and a bit of gridifying, although usually just with drums if I played them. I draw the line at vocal tuning, I just can't.
This blog post is nothing new to me, I've had these thoughts a thousand times. But it's a great reminder. Especially in the age of AI. Our imperfection and vulnerability is our gift.
The article doesn't seem to say this specifically, but my take at defining "gridification", in the sense of "why is this term in particular used to refer to the thing they are talking about". The article says "Gridification is when a human performance is treated as error in need of correction and turned into a machine-perfect representation of itself" but they could have used "blorficoration" for this; why "grid"?
Griddification is trying to take each note and align it to a grid, the two axes being time and pitch. All notes (spoken or sung or struck) start aligned and are tonally compatible. In that sense it is like the grid you see on a piano roll describing music. Basically a de-jittered midi-style reduction of the actual music being player.
Is this arguing that, in order to produce commercially valuable music, all music is conforming to a set of standards, or traits and conform to "a grid"? That's how I read it.
Does this (2019) article propose the opposite? That hit music usually contains a sort of pleasing surprise, and that over time our hits have to become more and more unpredictable musically?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/pop-music-good-br...
That's now I'm reading it. But I'm a music consumer, not a music creator, so I may be missing some nuance or conflating related ideas.
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 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.
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.
This is a marketing pitch. The people behind this article are selling a "Certificate of Embodied Production".
People have been bitching about this since the player piano. In modern popular music, is it a consequence of electronic dance music? That tends to be tightly synchronized, since it comes from clocked devices.
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.
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.
Quantization and DAWs.
Electronic music became pop and pop production now uses all the tools of electronic music.
This is why there are no "bands" anymore and everything is coming from solo producers & vocalists.
Man, the '75 hit just grabs me from the very first note. The funky rhythm, 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'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?
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.
I may be missing something here but most of the 2025 songs sound like they are clearly programmed drums.
Die with a Smile sounds like the exception but I wouldn't discard the idea that those drums were entirely programmed / painted either. It's not like it's difficult to make a flam in a piano roll.
Why not pick from genres that don't predominantly use drum machines as a better comparison?
Perhaps the answer to this is to create a model that will instantly apply a sleek, gridified, overproduced sound to music. The sound will lose prestige if it doesn’t take any time or skill and will then fall out of fashion.
Cool read. Would fit nicely into a broader cultural analysis Instrumental Rationality, which I would argue is the upstream cause of this phenomenon as the dominant framework of the world since the industrial revolution.
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.
Man in the box by Alice In Chains is a great example of this. The song starts at 105 bpm, then gets 5 bpm faster but then never settles back to exactly 105.
It’s almost amateurish when reading the music, but when you listen to it, it does have a very distinct feel to it.
Yeah it's called quantization. The thing is, though, is when you start producing music you realize heavily quantized music is extremely stale and boring. You have to put in effort by adding "off the grid" details to make it feel alive.
They're calling it gridification but most normies call this quantizing.
Funny thing about the Shaboozey song, which I just went & listened to, is that while the tempo might vary humanly, the vocals have been pitch-corrected to within an inch of their life, i.e. the song still sucks.
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
> 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's not just pop music. This plague has infested metal and it's unbearable.
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.
If I said music has turned to crap in the last 20 years, some people would say I'm an old man yelling at clouds, and that is probably true. But on the other hand, my teenage kids seem to agree. While they do listen to some modern music, a substantial amount of what they like is older than they are, and a non-trivial amount dates back to the 80s or even before.
I like that as a family we can enjoy a lot of the same music, but it is notably different from how things went when I was a kid.
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.
> Not taste. Not quality. Presence.
Ugh. Ironic that this blog post lambasting the use of machines to achieve inhuman levels of perfection is so clearly ai slop brained. This is far from the only LLM idiom I saw in here.
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.