Yet another Hacker News

93 points gumby 3 days ago 22 comments

khalic 1 hour ago | parent

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!

jschveibinz 1 hour ago | parent

Live music is the best!

khalic 57 minutes ago | parent

Yeah I love the connection with the artist and the crowd you feel with small venues

wodenokoto 58 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

Twey 53 minutes ago | parent

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 :)

bluGill 32 minutes ago | parent

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.

viraptor 24 minutes ago | parent

That's how I read it: "lost the ability to play together" -> "tracks recorded individually to clicks and perfected before mixing".

bitsinthesky 57 minutes ago | parent

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.

te_chris 43 minutes ago | parent

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?

jrajav 44 minutes ago | parent

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.

fludlow 20 minutes ago | parent

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.

another-dave 18 minutes ago | parent

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.

viraptor 12 minutes ago | parent

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.

pet_the_bird 5 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

lioeters 38 minutes ago | parent

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.

viraptor 27 minutes ago | parent

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.

daraghkan 27 minutes ago | parent

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

breakwaterlabs 25 minutes ago | parent

> 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?

kdfjgbdfkjgb 16 minutes ago | parent

this discussion is missing the concept of microtiming

ericyd 12 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

fragilerock 11 minutes ago | parent

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.