It's easy to take one of the greatest drummer's performances, quantize things, make it worse, and say "quantization sucks the soul out of music."

But what about the non-greatest drummers? The other 99.9% (or higher) of musicians who are tiers below Bonham? Quantization is a net improvement. It takes unlistenable performances and makes them listenable.

▲ fwlr 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Music before quantization:

                soul | soulless
    listenable ______|_________
  unlistenable       |

Music after quantization:

                     | soulless
    listenable       |_________

Hmm, this “net improvement” of yours seems to have obliterated some important categories. I don’t think I care for it.

▲ genghisjahn an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s just cheaper. It has nothing to do with it being more listenable. Same with auto tune. It’s cheaper to have some mediocre singer do the track and fix it later. You don’t have to pay the great singer. And if you do get a great singer, you don’t keep them in the studio for as long. It’s just a cost savings. It doesn’t improve the music.

	▲	rdiddly 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's cheaper to do what? The thing they're getting for less money is precisely the improved quality or listenability. Their definitions of quality and good enough might be fucked up, but the intent and purpose is clearly to improve it up to some minimal level of quality, otherwise how are they judging a mediocre vs. great singer? How do they know when the great singer is done singing (sang a good enough take), or when they've tweaked the mediocre vocal track enough? The technological interventions change the ratio of cost vs. quality, they don't make quality irrelevant. If they did, you could just record the crappy singer as-is and save even more money.

▲ hoorayimhelping an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

>It takes unlistenable performances and makes them listenable.

How is that a good thing?

Humans have limited attention and time, so most of us don't like to waste them on bad things. Human artistic history is suvivorship in practice. The best things rise to the top and are kept, and the worst fall away. This is a natural mechanism that produces a shared culture of good things. When everything is good, nothing is, which is exactly the place we find ourselves now.

Not everybody gets to be an astronaut when they grow up. Our culture celebrates mediocrity because we're afraid of the implications that certain people are naturally better than others. The result is we have no more heroes or aspirations, and computers can fix lack of talent and lack of effort at improvement.

	▲	yoz-y 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah. If you can’t do something that’s fine. I draw as a hobby but I suck at it. When I see some of the pre-post autotune performances I can’t feel that people are just feeling entitled to a paycheck.