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.