For the love of your recording engineer, please do not use this video as an excuse to not practice with a metronome 😂. If you enjoyed this video consider supporting my work over on Patreon: www.patreon.com/LeviMcClain Note: I should mention that most DAWs today allow you to go off grid to your hearts content, and pitch correction software can get very very fine grain allowing the user to weave in and out of the node points of the almighty 12TET pitch grid. correction(s): 4:18 The historical note on screen has a typo. It should say "contrametric rubato" instead of "agogic rubato". 19:53 I brought up Weber’s second challenge to the pendulum which was that it loses energy with each swing so the periodicity (tempo) it implies would always be in a state of flux. Weber believed this, however, apparently he wasn’t the best physics student because it’s not actually true… so I cut it out of the video.
@@Shane-zo4mg that would have been a really good angle of exploration! Admittedly, old school death metal is so outside of my depth that the thought didn’t even cross my mind.
@iksaxophone scream bloody gore by death. It has plenty of songs where the tempo is really wonky. The song evil dead is the worst for this problem. IMO it’s still a decent album but it does occasionally sound a little goofy. Scum by napalm death also has this issue. Granted it’s fast and chaotic most of the time but some of the slower parts and intros are really wonky.
Man, the sheer scale of effort and planning alone that has undoubtedly gone into this video! On top of the amount of research, interpretation, building a narrative, editing... Even the intro alone, obviously shot out of order, ended up looking and sounding so seamless that it's easy to fail to notice that you had to rehearse and coordinate each bit in advance
Of course, music ain't only gridified "horizontal" with rythm and nearly ubiquitous use of 4/4 ...but it is also gridified verticaly with equal temperament which lots of musicians use without ever questionning.. .. ;)
I think equal temperament is just so extremely helpful for learning and playing instrumental music, I can't really complain about it. I also think that artists should absolutely explore the infinite amount of tuning possibilities.
@@ForkySeven Of course, it is important so young students don't get all mixed up, that's for sure, i totally agree.. Problem is music schools keep the existence of other temperaments like somewhat of a secret. (Baroque music students learn how to tune their harpsichords in mesotonic , and modern music students study microtonal music.. but all this stays secretive and constrained to separate depts. No wonder, there are so many musicians who think ""Bach's preludes and fugues were written to demonstrate Equal Temperament's possibilities""" which is absolutely false. "
This is huge! After getting to know your channel by shorts (which were already great) I love seeing you doing a long video essay. I really like how youtube is getting more and more rich of reliable, well produced and captivating educational content like this!
I just deleted a comment of mine because it was written prematurely. I had some concerns but I didn’t bother to watch the whole presentation first. The moment you acknowledged the inevitability of the metronome about halfway through the video, the presentation took a much different (and more exciting) direction - almost like you changed the key or the tempo lol.
The quality of the writing and research. The elegant graphics and considered choice of additional footage. The great editing. The elegant framing and lighting of shots. The awesome music. It’s wild how talented you are at all of these things! Thanks for another brilliant, informative and thought-provoking video!
Really amazing, you have given me something I did not have, and with it towards new ideas I will go, thank you Time is a pendulum, and a living substance that impregnates a segment of experience, has a living and an end, before another time- biome is ignited for that experience with which we play. Excellent.
It's an interesting parallel to entropy, this progression toward a state that's so simple that it can no longer be divided. Variables like pitch fluctuation and tempo fluctuation are slowly phased out even for live performances through headphones, lip syncing, real time autotune, and all manner of things that make it more efficient. All this efficiency, the tiny things being cut away to smooth out the entire process for everyone involved, it seems to mirror the smooth rocks eroded over several years by a raging river. At some point we might reach a mathematically pure production of music, something as efficient as possible relative to its energy input and intended output. Something that can't be improved upon, a paradigm of the same for all of eternity. As far as I'm concerned I think we've got just as many new possibilities as we've lost through this whole ordeal. Sure we can't chart with rubato like we could during the gramophone days, but we can tune in a perfectly multi-layered transition in a song that has 5 different tempos playing at the same time until they all align perfectly into a polyrhythm with a new pulse that feels like a bunch of time signatures played over one tempo. Can you imagine trying to orchestrate that happening in the 1700s? Plus, another cool thing, we can take a kick drum part and speed the tempo up until it matches the frequency of a B note. Then we can take that B note and sample chop it into a riff, that goes har- I'm getting ahead of myself. I think this stuff's kinda cool.
Even before listening to the end, I thought this video is a good metaphor for the increasing granularization of information associated with scientific progress - or how a small ruling class is trying to quantify and granularize all human behavior in order to manipulate and capitalize off of our behavior (like the Chinese Social Credit System). Though not religious, like you ... I have faith that the Platonic ideals of truth, goodness, and beauty can not be reduced to Planck units. And I agree that we are predisposed to attempt to quantify quality. I'm now reminded of a pop-philosophy book from my undergrad years that explored this theme, Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". For context to my comment, I am a retired academic living in Japan for 42 years now, with an undergrad in biology, and grad school in applied linguistics, but decades of reading philosophy of science, math, and language. One of my underlying presumptions is that science, language, and math are ultimately metaphorical in nature, and rather than explaining anything, are provisional social constructs that describe epiphenomenon. At specific levels of granularization, science, math, and language are predictive (like turning the key of the car's ignition), but only within that particular domain or level of granularization. I can start my car, but I have little idea of how electricity works. Another of my presumptions is that the people making up subcultures tend to oscillate (ironically, like a metronome), swinging between two extremes - the precision of a finely granulated digital experience and the authenticity of something more immediate and intuitive. Hmm ... another form of the Hegelian dialectic? A more immediate problem I am having with the gridification of music is in a side job, tutoring a family in English as a foreign language in preparation for the breadwinner's transfer to the U.S. for a few years. Over the decades, I've used sing-alongs as one way of helping non-native speakers subconsciously get down a bit of the pitch, stress, rhyme, and rhythm of English. I ran into a brick wall when they requested to practice the English version of "Idol", a song by the Japanese duo, "Yoasobi". It is a typical modern anime song in that it quantizes pitch and rhythm but at such a high speed, that even native speakers of English can not reproduce the performance. For practical reasons, there are no live English versions of this available on RUclips, and I suspect that even the live Japanese version, with a huge number of views and upvotes, is accompanied by more than a mere click track. Podcaster "Wings of Pegasus"is doing a pretty good job of bringing to light the carefully choreographed digitalization of "live" vocals, a recent good example being a popular quartet from Korea .... Mamamoo. Without digital enhancement, the quartet is no Quarteto Em Cy or Manhattan Transfer, but they are good. With the unspecified standard of digital enhancement, they are so good, that I, along with the likes of Rick Beato, think many would-be musicians find that standard beyond their reach, and their potential path is nipped in the bud. And I suspect this is a subset of a larger phenomenon of cultural influencers using variables other than merit to achieve success, but in a zero-sum game at the expense of paving the way for a new generation. Rather than the tool of math, language, logic as the source of the problem, I suspect the most salient variable is the nature of those who wield the tool. Even in the best of all possible scenarios without childhood trauma, some research has indicated that a minimum of 1% of any human population is born with a predisposition to be high in Cluster B anti-social personality traits (dark-triads ... the pathological narcissists, machiavellian opportunists, and morphologically defined psychopaths among us). Like the example of Beethoven's nemesis, or how the assassination of Brian Thompson brought out the fact that UnitedHealthCare knowingly used 'faulty' A.I. to reject 90% of applicants for health insurance payouts. Just my guess, but the cat-and-mouse game is not between granularization and authenticity, but between Cluster B types (would-be god-kings) and more empathetic, neurotypical people. Populations larger than Dunbar's number give the edge to Cluster B's because they are neither able nor willing to depend on empathy-driven behavior. Observation and mimicry, granularization, divide-and-conquer, gas-lighing, copy-paste, stolen valor, thievery, violence, etc are behaviors such potentially sociopathic people have depended on since birth and become only more facile with experience. But similar to the way tools of logic, language, and math collapse under tautology and contradiction (Godel, Wittgenstein's Ladder, zen koans, etc.) ... large populations eventually collapse under their own weight of increasing corruption, what I call a "Tower of Babel syndrome'. Good video. Stimulating and ties a lot of things together with one specific object. Cheers from Japan
Great vid and I appreciate all the nuance at the end. Metronome is more than useful for making multi-layered music in a daw, but something that I've tried and it worked for me: recording yourself counting while imagining what you're gonna play; making slight tempo variations and indicating dynamics with your voice. Though of course it's only a good idea for certain kinds of music,
Great video! The heartbeat is actually rubato. When you breathe in, the heart beats slightly faster to get the O2 out to the rest of the body more quickly. When you breathe out, your heartbeat slows back down. The ability of the heart to respond like this to breath is a measure of health. The body does not work according to mechanization. Can you imagine if we tried to walk according to a type of rigid perfectionistic measure? Music also needs to breathe, and the tempo should be allowed to have slight tempo fluctuations to aid this feeling of breath. The "grid" like approach cuts off a lot of nuances in music, which I think, overall, is not a net positive. I have never found metronomes to be helpful except to know what tempo a piece should be played at. That said, I usually intuit the right tempo. A sense of time needs to be developed internally, and a metronome does not help that. A metronome for practice purposes is only useful AFTER an internal sense of time has been developed. I teach my students how to develop that internal sense of time, and when they are ready, we will pull out the metronome. But only as a reference, not to be a click track. If something *must* be quantized, then sure use the DAWS in recording. But that won't help you on stage. Only the internal sense of time will.
One of the rare occasions where I click on a recommended video that was just uploaded and has few views, expect nothing, and find gold. The fact that the sub count is still so low tells me a growth spurt is incoming. Keep it up!
Tuning is not just about tuning, its also about the instrumental design. The keyboard does not accomodate Pythagorean intonation well because all the notes are in a line across the X axis so we can only have enough room for one of each note, so only 12 notes per octave but other arrangments allow for more than one of each note. A double manual keyboard can be tuned so that for example although both keyboards are in 12 equal they can both differ from one another by 24 cents such that there are 24 notes per octave where the right hand can play notes that are a 24 cents sharp or flat of the left hand. This allows very close to just 5/4 thirds, 8/5 minot 6ths, 6/5 major 6ths and 6/5 minor thirds to be used in all key signitures. this instrument can play in 12 key signitures and has 19 notes per octave in each key signiture, so Pythagorean intonation is not limited, its instrument design and in particualr keyboard design thats limited ruclips.net/video/-L-jKEmSTh0/видео.html
Almost nobody does? Any decent producer does, if it's appropriate to what they're making, at least with regards to microrhythm. Temperament is more rarely played with, but there are hundreds of artists who experiment with it, and frankly i can totally understand why someone who's career relies on the marketability of their music would mostly avoid other kinds of tuning (though there are notable exceptions to this! Jacob Collier was able to fill the O2 arena in London, so some artists who play with that stuff are achieving wide commercial success).
I did not think a video about the metronome would be that interesting! This video is really well-made, from beginning to end-great work. Personally, I hate playing with a metronome and don't play with one anymore, but I did use it quite a bit for a span of a few years and find it was valuable in my musical learning. My sense of time used to lack a lot. The metronome helped me fix it and eventually internalize it to the point where now, I rarely use because I generally know when a tempo is stable(-ish) and when it is dragging or pushing. I simply feel it. But it did take many years of hard-work and awareness of time. Actually it still is something that requires a lot of awareness while playing. I still find myself sometimes playing a song and accelerating, but I'm not sure that playing with a click track is the only way to fix this. I think another way of fixing this is simply by being more aware of the time while playing their instrument. The metronome though can certainly help one by making obvious the moments of accelerating or decelerating. But I think ideally or eventually, the sense of acceleration and deceleration should be internalized too.
Very thought provoking! Here’s one of those thoughts. People love and hate mechanization because on the one hand it increases productivity but on the other, their skills can then be a commodity (i.e replaceable). I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older, but it seems undeniable that music today is produced and distributed as a commodity. Good for consumers (subjectively), bad for producers. Let’s face it, part of the reason musicians don’t like this is because it makes you obsolete.
Just a thought but now it's all quantised and digital can't one micro-dequantise to artistic effect - ie digitally reintroduce the very slight deviations from the grid (both rhythmically and pitch) of human performance
When quantizing, most DAWs will give you the option to add a percentage of "humanization", which will add a tiny bit of randomization to the timing of the notes, and make it feel a little less mechanical. Some DAWs let you add a "groove" to the quantization, which adds systematic variations to timing and velocity (like a slightly delayed 2 and 4 every bar). When using MIDI, you can nudge individual notes back or forward to get a more "human" feel. There are definitely things you can do within a grid-based environment to make the music sound less mechanical. You can also automate the tempo to add things like rubato or a fermata. Instead of quantizing an entire guitar track, you can manually edit any notes that are actually problematic and keep the rest, even if they are slightly off grid, etc. The problem is that 'perfect" has become the norm, at least in commercial music.
Not only can one, unless you're going for a quantized sound, you almost always will. But even then it doesn't matter, because you can do a *huge* amount within the grid. The only people whose creativity is being killed by the metronome were the already uncreative, in my opinion. Even when you are working with things which are truly on the grid (old drum machines for example), you can still do soooo much stuff.
Great video about this topic! Learned a lot - I knew about Beethoven’s metronome obsession but not the controversy behind its invention! I suppose history will reward the explainers/presenters more than the discoverers/doers in many cases.
Tangent on Godfrey Weber's thread pendulum: you could argue that practising to a thread pendulum is effective practise for following a conductor, and learning to keep time visually rather than auditorally, as well as adjusting to the kind of tempo fluidity much classical music requires. In a modern context there is absolutely no other reason to use one over a metronome, but that's one thing it has over it I guess lmao
What I find interesting is that around the invention of the metronome, Western music actually went through one of its biggest "rubato" phases, with Romanticism. The Baroque and Classical periods preceding it were, for the most part, pretty, umm, metronomic. That Romantic era of free-flowing time and constant tempo changes lasted well into the 20th century. Great video, and also great to see that your comment sections hasn't been rick-beatified. Yet.
Cant watch the full video rn but ill do it later, i feel like you would like J Dilla. Hip hop producer, infamous for his "drunk" feeling beats which are usually off grid and not stagnant.
The only grid I addhear to is equal temperament on my synths, and loops of my samples. I found a niche aesthetic beauty in the fact that my daws of choice didn't have any grid in place. Playing in your music directly/acousticly rather than using programmed midi is the other way ive been returning to the natural world. In my singer songwriter tunes the rhythm follows the poetry. Its just how I have chosen to stick it to the overlords of the music industry and speak in my own voice. If the metronome didn't exist I wouldn't have revolted against its principles and would probably(for better or worse) make much different music.
By now, many people have pointed out in the comments that DAWs don't force you to align to the grid. Even so, it's the default. When I open up Reaper, I have to choose a time signature and bpm (or accept the default 4/4 at 120), even if I'm going to ignore them. An interesting question to me is, how could a DAW be designed allow you to not even be aware of the grid, or to construct a sense of time that's not rigid? One idea I have is a DAW could allow you to play an initial track without any grid, then figure out where the beats are and how to group them based on your playing.
I sent the video to a friend I work with. He winged the tempo of his entire concept album and he wouldn't want to play to a grid until we got stuck having to replace an entire song's drum track and the session drummer he hired just won't wing the tempo of 15 minutes Christian Alien Core epics. So now he tried to work out playing to the grid and he kinda got into a depression. I hope it helps him
I think the shift from shuffle grooves to even eights in rock is one of the greatest losses we’ve made to daws. Classic jazz has kept its human uneven eights and I’m sad rock hasn’t done the same. There are exceptions but it still makes me sad.
Very interesting to think about. Great discussion piece and information I do tend to place more faith in the listener. So often there's a narrative that we as artists are feeding the public as arbiters but I believe the public has the ultimate power. If they feel the feeling, they press play. Quantized music is beautiful and inspiring like skyscrapers or lasers or anything else that you can't look away from for its impossible precision. In being so different from even us, its fleshy organic creators, these artificial constructions come across as alien and miraculous. It is simply interesting that these forms are possible in our reality at all, and thats quite the strong starting point for compelling art. It is easier now more than ever to see the machine as the opposition of nature, but we've distilled all mechanism from nature, exactly by exploring nature and the patterns of order woven into the universe. As to why people gravitate towards the alien and spectacular instead of the familiar warm hug of more organic forms, thats another question, and I'd point out that all of this quantized music introduces organic texture as a counterbalance in other ways. Either way, the modern listener seems to prefer this aesthetic for the feeling it evokes and not because a committee of artisans deemed it to be preferable according to mathematics As for the tool of the daw determining it more than either of these things, thats another very fair talking point.
@@uma4340 You are 100% correct, the only thing that should effect the tempo (in theory) is the length of thread. Webber and I should have spent more time in physics class 😂. I added a note to the pinned correction comment.
That is not totally true for the string pendulum. Its differential equation contains the sine of the deflection angle, therefore making its period nonlinear in the angle. The small angle approximation of the pendulum, that is taught in school, is only viable for deflection angles below 5-10°. For greater angles the pendulum is measurably faster. Thus it slows down due to friction, though imperceivable by eye.
The heartbeat is actually rubato. When you breathe in, the heart beats slightly faster to get the O2 out to the rest of the body more quickly. When you breathe out, your heartbeat slows back down. The ability of the heart to respond like this to breath is a measure of health.
Also, I think it's similar with microtonal pieces often being equal divisions of the octave, as well. They don't HAVE to be, but that's a common way to explore them.
I’ve never got into using the metronome, not for piano and not even for drums (where I don’t count). OK so my timing is a bit erratic, but I played mechanically half my (piano) life, so the last thing I wanted to do is to ingrain a rigid timing to my rhythm. The main trouble with a metronome is that you can’t breathe. I often pause for a moment at the end of a phrase or section, to take a musical breath or to add emphasis to the start of a new phrase or simply to create a nuance to a repeated section. A metronome dashes on relentlessly, not even allowing for retardo or accelerando. I practice timing and rhythm another way. Sorry, Beethoven. I don’t play your sonatas all that accurately either!
Shoutout to J Dilla for rejecting quantization thereby "humanizing the MPC". Probably the single biggest reason he is consodered the greatest hip-hop producer by so many people
Is it the case that we speak rhythmic poetry with care given to precise timing? Certainly not, as though there is a meter, the words have their own idea of when and how they should be spoken. Imagine practicing Shakespeare to a metronome!
Thought provoking and well produced video! Interesting connections between math and the history of the metronome. Mike Longo used to have a whole tirade about the metronome and most of the jazz community was quick to silence him. I think we missed out on his ideas by trying to snap jazz to a grid. Backing tracks are just as bad, and iReal can wreck havoc on those that can't breathe without it. At least Jamey Abersold had the intuition to hire real musicians. Back to Longo. He used to say that jazz time was three dimensional. That you couldn't notate jazz time on manuscript paper. He argued that jazz time was the result of polyrhythms layered one on top of another--all clashing with the fundamental beat. Jazz time was West African at its roots. I think that we downplay rhythm and time within the pedagogy of music. Just turn on a metronome and practice. I don't think the metronome is to blame as much as our misguided "scientific" approach--you made that connection in your video essay here. I think that the opposite is also true. At least in the study of jazz, there seems to be this inclination to place such a priority on harmony and scales that we are inclined to forget pulse altogether and play "rubato." Classical Romantic rubato actually has a pulse and breathes with the music. This "jazz practice rubato" is just playing music out of time to make sense of harmony. Ornette Coleman used to say "time no changes" but he made music. What do we make when we play time no changes? Theory? How does that translate to the bandstand, exactly--prioritizing harmony over and internal sense of time and rhythm? I think you're video opens up a huge controversy in the way we learn music. Rhythm should be the lens that we see ALL music. As we stand, Harmony is the ruler of our musical studies. When will rhythm seek its rightful throne?
Kind of like the idea that the machine overlords have already been taking over for centuries, by infiltrating our arts! Metronomes paved the way for AI. 😱
Watching this i thought of an actual good use for AI... Have a post performance grid in the DAW that aligns to what was played. So that you can still come back in with midi and effects, but now based on a grid that is dynamic to the performance
Don’t entirely agree with the claim that more popular genres of music are completely on the grid but (a) of course it’s okay to disagree in details, (b) generally speaking it’s true. And also: the metronome story was very interesting (esp. that I’ve read the mechanical Türk’s story once and there’s this intersection-though alas I remember few things, one that its original inventor in Hungary was interested in sound too: he was after mechanical speech reproduction and had mild success). Moreover, cue all that editing, examples, music bits and impeccable looks. I couldn’t omit the latter, I can only wonder how many hours of planning went into a video like this and how much unused/failed footage ended up being there, again generally for production of this level. I can be overly pessimistic about how much one has to put in but surely a lot of people would be too non-mindful of time and effort-things not many actually can use effectively to end up telling something nontrivial. So with that in mind: thanks! (I can say the same to many, but those many are still very few grains of sand in the grand desert of things.)
The claim that popular genres are completely quantized is just nonsense, honestly -- and even if it was true i personally don't think it matters that much, since any artist who *does* want to put in microrhthmic stuff and similar absolutely has the means to do so, either with manually recorded layers or just dequantising the notes in the DAW or whatever.
I'm a busker. I don't think I could bring myself to make music and then hand it over to someone to be destroyed with a machine and then presented to the public as music I made. I think I would rather be dead.
I think a giant part in this is our cultural obsession with binary extremes. Perfection is good or bad, if it is good then anything that is not perfect is bad. I think this goes way back, probably even before the Greeks and whatnot. In other cultures there is a far more ingrained sense of balance, like the yingyang in Asian cultures. There the idea of perfection is always balanced with imperfection, because only perfection would disrupt the balance. We don't care about balance, we care about being 'right', light over darkness. Just practicing with others and by yourself is not 'good enough', you can always get more perfect, and therefor better. Practicing with a metronome makes your timing more perfect, thus it has to be better than practicing without a metronome. I think this idea can be seen from top to bottom in our music. We are very intolerant of imperfection in music, an out of tune/rhythm note is literally unforgivable. We want to transcend to some kind of perfection, but in doing so we must eliminate humanity because humans are not perfect. You can perfectly tune your guitar by ear, but because a tuning device is more perfect, it HAS to be better. A singer's voice can be made more perfect in tune with Melodyne, then it MUST be better. It is in every aspect of the music, from rhythm to melody, but also in the more macro sense, the stage performances, the image you need to have, the work ethic. It all needs to aspire perfection, flawlessness. This is basically scientific thinking, you use a machine eye, a microscope, in order to achieve a more perfect vision, every aspect needs to be as perfect as possible, with as little imperfect human interference as possible. Thus, when we hear a rhythm that has a timing 'mistake', it bothers us because it is an human imperfect 'blemish' on our attempts to conceive transcendent perfection, it is an obstacle or weight that drags us down, In Indonesia, they don't really care as much about perfection as us, and you can hear it so clearly in recordings of children songs. They appreciate balance more, so they tolerate the fact that children can't sing yet, in a sense that is beautiful because it shows the balance between raw childhood and encultured adulthood. But if western people listen to it, many can't even tolerate it just for once, the out of tune belching of the children makes them physically uncomfortable, it cuts at the very core of our values and perspective on reality.
54:20 No irony there - if it is the case that music and culture has been on a constant downtrend for the past couple of generations it makes sense for every generation to notice the relative decline of what comes after it. You (and people using this argument) presuppose such criticism is not objective and is governed only by general skepticism for everything new which is always relative and never absolute. This argument is easily defeated though, because we witness drastic change in the culture landscape and mores in every next generation, meaning that people actually are prone to "getting with the times" and embracing the new.
@@LeviMcClain agreed. The point was there is a possibility it's not just a matter of old folks complaining about the new and I believe there is an objective decline. I can make a case about that but I don't want to write essays here. I think we can somewhat agree popular music now (the music getting the largest audience) is of lower quality than popular music historically (that is if you don't consider WAP and similar "pieces" to be progress).
But, if the metronome, and the marriage of arts and instrumental reason, was not a good influence, then isn't the realization that music is getting worse correct? It is only a cliche because it is hard to stop and it takes a lot of time to realize it, and therefor it continues to happen as music continues to get worse. There seems to be a strong blind trust in the idea that we must be progressing, which automatically discards any doubt. If things can get better, they can also get worse. Even if it is only the case that the thing which makes things better isn't effectively implemented, then that means progress is not a given, but its rate can fluctuate based on things that happen in society. Technological progress does not have to equate to overall progress for humanity. For instance, we can listen to more music than ever before, but at the cost of hearing less live music than ever before. People are able to listen to more diverse music if we look at it through the dimension of style/genre, but people are less able to listen to diverse music when we look at it through the dimension of non-commercial music, because all access is through commercially driven platforms. Being a musician has never been cheaper, instruments are dirt cheap, you can find a teacher dirt cheap online, all scores are free, recording technology is dirt cheap, you can publish everything yourself for dirt cheap, etc, but there isn't really anything left to do as a musician except for commerce. Of course that is not to say everything is bad and there is no good music anymore, it is not a black and white thing that is either all good or all bad. It is more so challenging the almost religious faith in the idea that music always gets better, and that any challenge to that idea can be automatically discarded as elitist, boomer screaming at the clouds, snobbishness. Music did get a lot better in many ways, but it also got worse in a lot of ways. The whole point of being a snobbish elitist boomer is to make it even better. It only feels like an attack because of the mythological believe that music always gets better.If you believe the Earth is the center of the Universe because it fits with other stories you like to believe, then it feels like an attack when someone says "actually, it is the sun that is at the center of our solar system" because it does not only change the believe about the Earth and the sun, but also all those other stories you tied up in that myth. For instance, if music can get worse, then society must be able to get worse even though we have better cars and better medicine, which is of course off-limits.
I'm going to confess that I did not listen before commenting, but claiming that the metronome destroyed music is like claiming that scales destroyed musicality or notation destroyed composition. In other words, the title is a turn off. But I will get around to listening eventually. Since I did take the time to comment.
How much do you want to bet that mechanized time as well as pitch correction and limiters will eventually be heard as old fashioned and quaint, the product of crude and primitive technology that was incapable of any sophistication! Rigid timing will be heard as a result of poorly designed technology since an advanced machine should be able to follow a changing tempo and insert anything where you need it, including ahead of or behind the beat since that sounds a lot more exciting. A 12 tone pitch "corrector" will be seen as dumb old fashioned technology since a more advanced machine could impose any tuning scheme according to taste, many of which tuning schemes sound a lot better than 12 equal. The same with compression which was necessary because the old archaic technology could not handle a wide dynamic range without distorting. Music that never varies its tempo and is always right on the beat and which is in perfect 12 equal no matter what and which has no dynamic variation will be heard as dumb and out of style as the technology gets better than all that. For right now the music industry thinks it has successfully dumbed the product down to its ongoing advantage, but I bet the party does not last because its no party, most such music sounds the same and it is deeply boring, competition will move on to better machines and not the crude machines of the past.
Why? Dude was pretty cool, all things considered. Making wonky rhythmic changes to screw with the nobles at their little dance parties is something we should all aspire to do.
These kinds of musicology/music history videos are my bread and butter! Been doing them long before the microtonal stuff. Did you just disagree with this, or is there something else that bothered you with it? 😅
For the love of your recording engineer, please do not use this video as an excuse to not practice with a metronome 😂. If you enjoyed this video consider supporting my work over on Patreon: www.patreon.com/LeviMcClain
Note: I should mention that most DAWs today allow you to go off grid to your hearts content, and pitch correction software can get very very fine grain allowing the user to weave in and out of the node points of the almighty 12TET pitch grid.
correction(s):
4:18 The historical note on screen has a typo. It should say "contrametric rubato" instead of "agogic rubato".
19:53 I brought up Weber’s second challenge to the pendulum which was that it loses energy with each swing so the periodicity (tempo) it implies would always be in a state of flux. Weber believed this, however, apparently he wasn’t the best physics student because it’s not actually true… so I cut it out of the video.
Listening to old-school death metal really speaks volumes to how much playing to a click changed things
@@Shane-zo4mg that would have been a really good angle of exploration! Admittedly, old school death metal is so outside of my depth that the thought didn’t even cross my mind.
that's a really interesting thing to investigate, could you name a couple of those bands so I can listen to their songs?
Got any albums that are good examples?
@iksaxophone scream bloody gore by death. It has plenty of songs where the tempo is really wonky. The song evil dead is the worst for this problem. IMO it’s still a decent album but it does occasionally sound a little goofy. Scum by napalm death also has this issue. Granted it’s fast and chaotic most of the time but some of the slower parts and intros are really wonky.
I loved this just as much as I expected to. A bravura tour de force of geekery and I am here for it.
Man, the sheer scale of effort and planning alone that has undoubtedly gone into this video! On top of the amount of research, interpretation, building a narrative, editing... Even the intro alone, obviously shot out of order, ended up looking and sounding so seamless that it's easy to fail to notice that you had to rehearse and coordinate each bit in advance
Thank you, I appreciate that so much! The video took so long to film that I ended up with a beard by the end of it 🤣
I second this. You made a whole documentary!
Of course, music ain't only gridified "horizontal" with rythm and nearly ubiquitous use of 4/4 ...but it is also gridified verticaly with equal temperament which lots of musicians use without ever questionning.. .. ;)
@@misterguy9051 true! There is a deep systemic argument there for sure.
I think equal temperament is just so extremely helpful for learning and playing instrumental music, I can't really complain about it. I also think that artists should absolutely explore the infinite amount of tuning possibilities.
@@ForkySeven Of course, it is important so young students don't get all mixed up, that's for sure, i totally agree.. Problem is music schools keep the existence of other temperaments like somewhat of a secret. (Baroque music students learn how to tune their harpsichords in mesotonic , and modern music students study microtonal music.. but all this stays secretive and constrained to separate depts. No wonder, there are so many musicians who think ""Bach's preludes and fugues were written to demonstrate Equal Temperament's possibilities""" which is absolutely false. "
This is huge! After getting to know your channel by shorts (which were already great) I love seeing you doing a long video essay. I really like how youtube is getting more and more rich of reliable, well produced and captivating educational content like this!
@@FabioCuccuMusic thank you!
such an incredible video & organization of complex ideas, love your stuff dude
I just deleted a comment of mine because it was written prematurely. I had some concerns but I didn’t bother to watch the whole presentation first. The moment you acknowledged the inevitability of the metronome about halfway through the video, the presentation took a much different (and more exciting) direction - almost like you changed the key or the tempo lol.
The quality of the writing and research. The elegant graphics and considered choice of additional footage. The great editing. The elegant framing and lighting of shots. The awesome music. It’s wild how talented you are at all of these things!
Thanks for another brilliant, informative and thought-provoking video!
Thank you so much Bob! Feels good to know the extra effort was worth it
It was pleasure to watch it. Very Inspiring! Thanks Levi :)
Really amazing, you have given me something I did not have, and with it towards new ideas I will go, thank you
Time is a pendulum, and a living substance that impregnates a segment of experience, has a living and an end, before another time- biome is ignited for that experience with which we play. Excellent.
It's an interesting parallel to entropy, this progression toward a state that's so simple that it can no longer be divided. Variables like pitch fluctuation and tempo fluctuation are slowly phased out even for live performances through headphones, lip syncing, real time autotune, and all manner of things that make it more efficient. All this efficiency, the tiny things being cut away to smooth out the entire process for everyone involved, it seems to mirror the smooth rocks eroded over several years by a raging river. At some point we might reach a mathematically pure production of music, something as efficient as possible relative to its energy input and intended output. Something that can't be improved upon, a paradigm of the same for all of eternity.
As far as I'm concerned I think we've got just as many new possibilities as we've lost through this whole ordeal. Sure we can't chart with rubato like we could during the gramophone days, but we can tune in a perfectly multi-layered transition in a song that has 5 different tempos playing at the same time until they all align perfectly into a polyrhythm with a new pulse that feels like a bunch of time signatures played over one tempo. Can you imagine trying to orchestrate that happening in the 1700s? Plus, another cool thing, we can take a kick drum part and speed the tempo up until it matches the frequency of a B note. Then we can take that B note and sample chop it into a riff, that goes har- I'm getting ahead of myself. I think this stuff's kinda cool.
@@thisisanexonym wholeheartedly agree
Even before listening to the end, I thought this video is a good metaphor for the increasing granularization of information associated with scientific progress - or how a small ruling class is trying to quantify and granularize all human behavior in order to manipulate and capitalize off of our behavior (like the Chinese Social Credit System). Though not religious, like you ... I have faith that the Platonic ideals of truth, goodness, and beauty can not be reduced to Planck units. And I agree that we are predisposed to attempt to quantify quality. I'm now reminded of a pop-philosophy book from my undergrad years that explored this theme, Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".
For context to my comment, I am a retired academic living in Japan for 42 years now, with an undergrad in biology, and grad school in applied linguistics, but decades of reading philosophy of science, math, and language. One of my underlying presumptions is that science, language, and math are ultimately metaphorical in nature, and rather than explaining anything, are provisional social constructs that describe epiphenomenon. At specific levels of granularization, science, math, and language are predictive (like turning the key of the car's ignition), but only within that particular domain or level of granularization. I can start my car, but I have little idea of how electricity works.
Another of my presumptions is that the people making up subcultures tend to oscillate (ironically, like a metronome), swinging between two extremes - the precision of a finely granulated digital experience and the authenticity of something more immediate and intuitive. Hmm ... another form of the Hegelian dialectic?
A more immediate problem I am having with the gridification of music is in a side job, tutoring a family in English as a foreign language in preparation for the breadwinner's transfer to the U.S. for a few years. Over the decades, I've used sing-alongs as one way of helping non-native speakers subconsciously get down a bit of the pitch, stress, rhyme, and rhythm of English.
I ran into a brick wall when they requested to practice the English version of "Idol", a song by the Japanese duo, "Yoasobi". It is a typical modern anime song in that it quantizes pitch and rhythm but at such a high speed, that even native speakers of English can not reproduce the performance. For practical reasons, there are no live English versions of this available on RUclips, and I suspect that even the live Japanese version, with a huge number of views and upvotes, is accompanied by more than a mere click track.
Podcaster "Wings of Pegasus"is doing a pretty good job of bringing to light the carefully choreographed digitalization of "live" vocals, a recent good example being a popular quartet from Korea .... Mamamoo. Without digital enhancement, the quartet is no Quarteto Em Cy or Manhattan Transfer, but they are good. With the unspecified standard of digital enhancement, they are so good, that I, along with the likes of Rick Beato, think many would-be musicians find that standard beyond their reach, and their potential path is nipped in the bud. And I suspect this is a subset of a larger phenomenon of cultural influencers using variables other than merit to achieve success, but in a zero-sum game at the expense of paving the way for a new generation.
Rather than the tool of math, language, logic as the source of the problem, I suspect the most salient variable is the nature of those who wield the tool. Even in the best of all possible scenarios without childhood trauma, some research has indicated that a minimum of 1% of any human population is born with a predisposition to be high in Cluster B anti-social personality traits (dark-triads ... the pathological narcissists, machiavellian opportunists, and morphologically defined psychopaths among us). Like the example of Beethoven's nemesis, or how the assassination of Brian Thompson brought out the fact that UnitedHealthCare knowingly used 'faulty' A.I. to reject 90% of applicants for health insurance payouts.
Just my guess, but the cat-and-mouse game is not between granularization and authenticity, but between Cluster B types (would-be god-kings) and more empathetic, neurotypical people. Populations larger than Dunbar's number give the edge to Cluster B's because they are neither able nor willing to depend on empathy-driven behavior. Observation and mimicry, granularization, divide-and-conquer, gas-lighing, copy-paste, stolen valor, thievery, violence, etc are behaviors such potentially sociopathic people have depended on since birth and become only more facile with experience. But similar to the way tools of logic, language, and math collapse under tautology and contradiction (Godel, Wittgenstein's Ladder, zen koans, etc.) ... large populations eventually collapse under their own weight of increasing corruption, what I call a "Tower of Babel syndrome'.
Good video. Stimulating and ties a lot of things together with one specific object.
Cheers from Japan
Great cinematography, great storytelling. Bravo!
Thank you!
Metronome funeral animation sequence was very moving 😢
Great vid and I appreciate all the nuance at the end. Metronome is more than useful for making multi-layered music in a daw, but something that I've tried and it worked for me: recording yourself counting while imagining what you're gonna play; making slight tempo variations and indicating dynamics with your voice. Though of course it's only a good idea for certain kinds of music,
Great video! The heartbeat is actually rubato. When you breathe in, the heart beats slightly faster to get the O2 out to the rest of the body more quickly. When you breathe out, your heartbeat slows back down. The ability of the heart to respond like this to breath is a measure of health. The body does not work according to mechanization. Can you imagine if we tried to walk according to a type of rigid perfectionistic measure? Music also needs to breathe, and the tempo should be allowed to have slight tempo fluctuations to aid this feeling of breath. The "grid" like approach cuts off a lot of nuances in music, which I think, overall, is not a net positive. I have never found metronomes to be helpful except to know what tempo a piece should be played at. That said, I usually intuit the right tempo. A sense of time needs to be developed internally, and a metronome does not help that. A metronome for practice purposes is only useful AFTER an internal sense of time has been developed. I teach my students how to develop that internal sense of time, and when they are ready, we will pull out the metronome. But only as a reference, not to be a click track. If something *must* be quantized, then sure use the DAWS in recording. But that won't help you on stage. Only the internal sense of time will.
One of the rare occasions where I click on a recommended video that was just uploaded and has few views, expect nothing, and find gold. The fact that the sub count is still so low tells me a growth spurt is incoming. Keep it up!
Tuning is not just about tuning, its also about the instrumental design. The keyboard does not accomodate Pythagorean intonation well because all the notes are in a line across the X axis so we can only have enough room for one of each note, so only 12 notes per octave but other arrangments allow for more than one of each note.
A double manual keyboard can be tuned so that for example although both keyboards are in 12 equal they can both differ from one another by 24 cents such that there are 24 notes per octave where the right hand can play notes that are a 24 cents sharp or flat of the left hand.
This allows very close to just 5/4 thirds, 8/5 minot 6ths, 6/5 major 6ths and 6/5 minor thirds to be used in all key signitures.
this instrument can play in 12 key signitures and has 19 notes per octave in each key signiture, so Pythagorean intonation is not limited, its instrument design and in particualr keyboard design thats limited
ruclips.net/video/-L-jKEmSTh0/видео.html
With computers, we can do absolutely any kind of microrhythm and temperament, and almost nobody does. It has made things more monolithic.
This is the saddest aspect in modern music
I do those things! Check out my Bandcamp
Nah, not true. Microrythm is fairly present on rap/rnb. Both in vocals and instrumentals. Check the Adam Neely video on j dilla drumming.
Almost nobody does? Any decent producer does, if it's appropriate to what they're making, at least with regards to microrhythm. Temperament is more rarely played with, but there are hundreds of artists who experiment with it, and frankly i can totally understand why someone who's career relies on the marketability of their music would mostly avoid other kinds of tuning (though there are notable exceptions to this! Jacob Collier was able to fill the O2 arena in London, so some artists who play with that stuff are achieving wide commercial success).
I did not think a video about the metronome would be that interesting! This video is really well-made, from beginning to end-great work. Personally, I hate playing with a metronome and don't play with one anymore, but I did use it quite a bit for a span of a few years and find it was valuable in my musical learning. My sense of time used to lack a lot. The metronome helped me fix it and eventually internalize it to the point where now, I rarely use because I generally know when a tempo is stable(-ish) and when it is dragging or pushing. I simply feel it. But it did take many years of hard-work and awareness of time. Actually it still is something that requires a lot of awareness while playing. I still find myself sometimes playing a song and accelerating, but I'm not sure that playing with a click track is the only way to fix this. I think another way of fixing this is simply by being more aware of the time while playing their instrument. The metronome though can certainly help one by making obvious the moments of accelerating or decelerating. But I think ideally or eventually, the sense of acceleration and deceleration should be internalized too.
That intro sequence earned my like
Very thought provoking! Here’s one of those thoughts. People love and hate mechanization because on the one hand it increases productivity but on the other, their skills can then be a commodity (i.e replaceable). I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older, but it seems undeniable that music today is produced and distributed as a commodity. Good for consumers (subjectively), bad for producers. Let’s face it, part of the reason musicians don’t like this is because it makes you obsolete.
we can't keep doing this, man
@@Patricia_Taxxon how is he still getting away with this!?
Just a thought but now it's all quantised and digital can't one micro-dequantise to artistic effect - ie digitally reintroduce the very slight deviations from the grid (both rhythmically and pitch) of human performance
When quantizing, most DAWs will give you the option to add a percentage of "humanization", which will add a tiny bit of randomization to the timing of the notes, and make it feel a little less mechanical.
Some DAWs let you add a "groove" to the quantization, which adds systematic variations to timing and velocity (like a slightly delayed 2 and 4 every bar).
When using MIDI, you can nudge individual notes back or forward to get a more "human" feel.
There are definitely things you can do within a grid-based environment to make the music sound less mechanical. You can also automate the tempo to add things like rubato or a fermata. Instead of quantizing an entire guitar track, you can manually edit any notes that are actually problematic and keep the rest, even if they are slightly off grid, etc.
The problem is that 'perfect" has become the norm, at least in commercial music.
Not only can one, unless you're going for a quantized sound, you almost always will. But even then it doesn't matter, because you can do a *huge* amount within the grid. The only people whose creativity is being killed by the metronome were the already uncreative, in my opinion.
Even when you are working with things which are truly on the grid (old drum machines for example), you can still do soooo much stuff.
Another absolute banger, thank you Levi.
Great video about this topic! Learned a lot - I knew about Beethoven’s metronome obsession but not the controversy behind its invention! I suppose history will reward the explainers/presenters more than the discoverers/doers in many cases.
Your videos are very cool, thank you for the effort!
@@marceloleal1957 appreciate the kind words!
Tangent on Godfrey Weber's thread pendulum: you could argue that practising to a thread pendulum is effective practise for following a conductor, and learning to keep time visually rather than auditorally, as well as adjusting to the kind of tempo fluidity much classical music requires. In a modern context there is absolutely no other reason to use one over a metronome, but that's one thing it has over it I guess lmao
What I find interesting is that around the invention of the metronome, Western music actually went through one of its biggest "rubato" phases, with Romanticism. The Baroque and Classical periods preceding it were, for the most part, pretty, umm, metronomic. That Romantic era of free-flowing time and constant tempo changes lasted well into the 20th century.
Great video, and also great to see that your comment sections hasn't been rick-beatified. Yet.
Cant watch the full video rn but ill do it later, i feel like you would like J Dilla. Hip hop producer, infamous for his "drunk" feeling beats which are usually off grid and not stagnant.
The only grid I addhear to is equal temperament on my synths, and loops of my samples. I found a niche aesthetic beauty in the fact that my daws of choice didn't have any grid in place. Playing in your music directly/acousticly rather than using programmed midi is the other way ive been returning to the natural world. In my singer songwriter tunes the rhythm follows the poetry. Its just how I have chosen to stick it to the overlords of the music industry and speak in my own voice. If the metronome didn't exist I wouldn't have revolted against its principles and would probably(for better or worse) make much different music.
By now, many people have pointed out in the comments that DAWs don't force you to align to the grid. Even so, it's the default. When I open up Reaper, I have to choose a time signature and bpm (or accept the default 4/4 at 120), even if I'm going to ignore them. An interesting question to me is, how could a DAW be designed allow you to not even be aware of the grid, or to construct a sense of time that's not rigid?
One idea I have is a DAW could allow you to play an initial track without any grid, then figure out where the beats are and how to group them based on your playing.
I sent the video to a friend I work with. He winged the tempo of his entire concept album and he wouldn't want to play to a grid until we got stuck having to replace an entire song's drum track and the session drummer he hired just won't wing the tempo of 15 minutes Christian Alien Core epics. So now he tried to work out playing to the grid and he kinda got into a depression. I hope it helps him
But thanks to it we have Beethoven’s canon: TA TA TA TA TA TA TA TA metronom
bargain bin rick beato just killed me :D
I think the shift from shuffle grooves to even eights in rock is one of the greatest losses we’ve made to daws.
Classic jazz has kept its human uneven eights and I’m sad rock hasn’t done the same.
There are exceptions but it still makes me sad.
Very interesting to think about. Great discussion piece and information
I do tend to place more faith in the listener. So often there's a narrative that we as artists are feeding the public as arbiters but I believe the public has the ultimate power. If they feel the feeling, they press play.
Quantized music is beautiful and inspiring like skyscrapers or lasers or anything else that you can't look away from for its impossible precision. In being so different from even us, its fleshy organic creators, these artificial constructions come across as alien and miraculous. It is simply interesting that these forms are possible in our reality at all, and thats quite the strong starting point for compelling art.
It is easier now more than ever to see the machine as the opposition of nature, but we've distilled all mechanism from nature, exactly by exploring nature and the patterns of order woven into the universe. As to why people gravitate towards the alien and spectacular instead of the familiar warm hug of more organic forms, thats another question, and I'd point out that all of this quantized music introduces organic texture as a counterbalance in other ways. Either way, the modern listener seems to prefer this aesthetic for the feeling it evokes and not because a committee of artisans deemed it to be preferable according to mathematics
As for the tool of the daw determining it more than either of these things, thats another very fair talking point.
20:06 That's not actually true, a pendulum will always swing at the same frequency, no matter how much momentum it has left.
@@uma4340 You are 100% correct, the only thing that should effect the tempo (in theory) is the length of thread. Webber and I should have spent more time in physics class 😂. I added a note to the pinned correction comment.
That is not totally true for the string pendulum. Its differential equation contains the sine of the deflection angle, therefore making its period nonlinear in the angle. The small angle approximation of the pendulum, that is taught in school, is only viable for deflection angles below 5-10°. For greater angles the pendulum is measurably faster. Thus it slows down due to friction, though imperceivable by eye.
Would it be possibile to access Decartes’ source? Where can I find a referece?
@@simonefalcetti7685 the library of congress has a copy of compendium musicae scanned on their website
The heartbeat destroyed music
The heartbeat is actually rubato. When you breathe in, the heart beats slightly faster to get the O2 out to the rest of the body more quickly. When you breathe out, your heartbeat slows back down. The ability of the heart to respond like this to breath is a measure of health.
My first video Ive seen from you, very good stuff 👍
Excellent video, very thought provoking... the metronome, or something similar, was inevitable in our technological culture, for sure. 12tet, too.
Also, I think it's similar with microtonal pieces often being equal divisions of the octave, as well. They don't HAVE to be, but that's a common way to explore them.
I’ve never got into using the metronome, not for piano and not even for drums (where I don’t count). OK so my timing is a bit erratic, but I played mechanically half my (piano) life, so the last thing I wanted to do is to ingrain a rigid timing to my rhythm.
The main trouble with a metronome is that you can’t breathe. I often pause for a moment at the end of a phrase or section, to take a musical breath or to add emphasis to the start of a new phrase or simply to create a nuance to a repeated section. A metronome dashes on relentlessly, not even allowing for retardo or accelerando.
I practice timing and rhythm another way. Sorry, Beethoven. I don’t play your sonatas all that accurately either!
Yo nice info
Shoutout to J Dilla for rejecting quantization thereby "humanizing the MPC". Probably the single biggest reason he is consodered the greatest hip-hop producer by so many people
Is it the case that we speak rhythmic poetry with care given to precise timing? Certainly not, as though there is a meter, the words have their own idea of when and how they should be spoken.
Imagine practicing Shakespeare to a metronome!
"Ducat": First syllable as in "duck it", second syllable as in "docket".
@@AlexanderClark-x4m ahhhh, clearly I’ve been watching too much star trek
Is there a DAW with more elastic grid?
Cubase Pro
Thought provoking and well produced video! Interesting connections between math and the history of the metronome.
Mike Longo used to have a whole tirade about the metronome and most of the jazz community was quick to silence him. I think we missed out on his ideas by trying to snap jazz to a grid. Backing tracks are just as bad, and iReal can wreck havoc on those that can't breathe without it. At least Jamey Abersold had the intuition to hire real musicians.
Back to Longo. He used to say that jazz time was three dimensional. That you couldn't notate jazz time on manuscript paper. He argued that jazz time was the result of polyrhythms layered one on top of another--all clashing with the fundamental beat. Jazz time was West African at its roots.
I think that we downplay rhythm and time within the pedagogy of music. Just turn on a metronome and practice. I don't think the metronome is to blame as much as our misguided "scientific" approach--you made that connection in your video essay here.
I think that the opposite is also true. At least in the study of jazz, there seems to be this inclination to place such a priority on harmony and scales that we are inclined to forget pulse altogether and play "rubato." Classical Romantic rubato actually has a pulse and breathes with the music. This "jazz practice rubato" is just playing music out of time to make sense of harmony. Ornette Coleman used to say "time no changes" but he made music. What do we make when we play time no changes? Theory? How does that translate to the bandstand, exactly--prioritizing harmony over and internal sense of time and rhythm?
I think you're video opens up a huge controversy in the way we learn music. Rhythm should be the lens that we see ALL music. As we stand, Harmony is the ruler of our musical studies. When will rhythm seek its rightful throne?
Kind of like the idea that the machine overlords have already been taking over for centuries, by infiltrating our arts!
Metronomes paved the way for AI.
😱
It's temporal correctness gone MAD!
Watching this i thought of an actual good use for AI... Have a post performance grid in the DAW that aligns to what was played. So that you can still come back in with midi and effects, but now based on a grid that is dynamic to the performance
Don’t entirely agree with the claim that more popular genres of music are completely on the grid but (a) of course it’s okay to disagree in details, (b) generally speaking it’s true. And also: the metronome story was very interesting (esp. that I’ve read the mechanical Türk’s story once and there’s this intersection-though alas I remember few things, one that its original inventor in Hungary was interested in sound too: he was after mechanical speech reproduction and had mild success).
Moreover, cue all that editing, examples, music bits and impeccable looks. I couldn’t omit the latter, I can only wonder how many hours of planning went into a video like this and how much unused/failed footage ended up being there, again generally for production of this level. I can be overly pessimistic about how much one has to put in but surely a lot of people would be too non-mindful of time and effort-things not many actually can use effectively to end up telling something nontrivial. So with that in mind: thanks!
(I can say the same to many, but those many are still very few grains of sand in the grand desert of things.)
The claim that popular genres are completely quantized is just nonsense, honestly -- and even if it was true i personally don't think it matters that much, since any artist who *does* want to put in microrhthmic stuff and similar absolutely has the means to do so, either with manually recorded layers or just dequantising the notes in the DAW or whatever.
I'm a busker. I don't think I could bring myself to make music and then hand it over to someone to be destroyed with a machine and then presented to the public as music I made. I think I would rather be dead.
insane recommended pull
true
good video!
I think a giant part in this is our cultural obsession with binary extremes. Perfection is good or bad, if it is good then anything that is not perfect is bad. I think this goes way back, probably even before the Greeks and whatnot. In other cultures there is a far more ingrained sense of balance, like the yingyang in Asian cultures. There the idea of perfection is always balanced with imperfection, because only perfection would disrupt the balance. We don't care about balance, we care about being 'right', light over darkness. Just practicing with others and by yourself is not 'good enough', you can always get more perfect, and therefor better. Practicing with a metronome makes your timing more perfect, thus it has to be better than practicing without a metronome.
I think this idea can be seen from top to bottom in our music. We are very intolerant of imperfection in music, an out of tune/rhythm note is literally unforgivable. We want to transcend to some kind of perfection, but in doing so we must eliminate humanity because humans are not perfect. You can perfectly tune your guitar by ear, but because a tuning device is more perfect, it HAS to be better. A singer's voice can be made more perfect in tune with Melodyne, then it MUST be better. It is in every aspect of the music, from rhythm to melody, but also in the more macro sense, the stage performances, the image you need to have, the work ethic. It all needs to aspire perfection, flawlessness. This is basically scientific thinking, you use a machine eye, a microscope, in order to achieve a more perfect vision, every aspect needs to be as perfect as possible, with as little imperfect human interference as possible. Thus, when we hear a rhythm that has a timing 'mistake', it bothers us because it is an human imperfect 'blemish' on our attempts to conceive transcendent perfection, it is an obstacle or weight that drags us down,
In Indonesia, they don't really care as much about perfection as us, and you can hear it so clearly in recordings of children songs. They appreciate balance more, so they tolerate the fact that children can't sing yet, in a sense that is beautiful because it shows the balance between raw childhood and encultured adulthood. But if western people listen to it, many can't even tolerate it just for once, the out of tune belching of the children makes them physically uncomfortable, it cuts at the very core of our values and perspective on reality.
My favorite rubato is in Tichelli’s Angels in the Architecture, with the vocalist singing at a different tempo than the rest of the band in the start
54:20 No irony there - if it is the case that music and culture has been on a constant downtrend for the past couple of generations it makes sense for every generation to notice the relative decline of what comes after it. You (and people using this argument) presuppose such criticism is not objective and is governed only by general skepticism for everything new which is always relative and never absolute. This argument is easily defeated though, because we witness drastic change in the culture landscape and mores in every next generation, meaning that people actually are prone to "getting with the times" and embracing the new.
@@0live0wire0 strong presupposition is that music and culture has been on a downtrend tho
@@LeviMcClain agreed. The point was there is a possibility it's not just a matter of old folks complaining about the new and I believe there is an objective decline. I can make a case about that but I don't want to write essays here. I think we can somewhat agree popular music now (the music getting the largest audience) is of lower quality than popular music historically (that is if you don't consider WAP and similar "pieces" to be progress).
James Brown used a metronome.... it was a Clyde Stubblefield metronome, i.e., his drummer.
But, if the metronome, and the marriage of arts and instrumental reason, was not a good influence, then isn't the realization that music is getting worse correct? It is only a cliche because it is hard to stop and it takes a lot of time to realize it, and therefor it continues to happen as music continues to get worse.
There seems to be a strong blind trust in the idea that we must be progressing, which automatically discards any doubt. If things can get better, they can also get worse. Even if it is only the case that the thing which makes things better isn't effectively implemented, then that means progress is not a given, but its rate can fluctuate based on things that happen in society. Technological progress does not have to equate to overall progress for humanity. For instance, we can listen to more music than ever before, but at the cost of hearing less live music than ever before. People are able to listen to more diverse music if we look at it through the dimension of style/genre, but people are less able to listen to diverse music when we look at it through the dimension of non-commercial music, because all access is through commercially driven platforms. Being a musician has never been cheaper, instruments are dirt cheap, you can find a teacher dirt cheap online, all scores are free, recording technology is dirt cheap, you can publish everything yourself for dirt cheap, etc, but there isn't really anything left to do as a musician except for commerce.
Of course that is not to say everything is bad and there is no good music anymore, it is not a black and white thing that is either all good or all bad. It is more so challenging the almost religious faith in the idea that music always gets better, and that any challenge to that idea can be automatically discarded as elitist, boomer screaming at the clouds, snobbishness. Music did get a lot better in many ways, but it also got worse in a lot of ways. The whole point of being a snobbish elitist boomer is to make it even better. It only feels like an attack because of the mythological believe that music always gets better.If you believe the Earth is the center of the Universe because it fits with other stories you like to believe, then it feels like an attack when someone says "actually, it is the sun that is at the center of our solar system" because it does not only change the believe about the Earth and the sun, but also all those other stories you tied up in that myth. For instance, if music can get worse, then society must be able to get worse even though we have better cars and better medicine, which is of course off-limits.
I'm going to confess that I did not listen before commenting, but claiming that the metronome destroyed music is like claiming that scales destroyed musicality or notation destroyed composition.
In other words, the title is a turn off. But I will get around to listening eventually. Since I did take the time to comment.
@@sPi711 spoiler: I agree with you
How much do you want to bet that mechanized time as well as pitch correction and limiters will eventually be heard as old fashioned and quaint, the product of crude and primitive technology that was incapable of any sophistication!
Rigid timing will be heard as a result of poorly designed technology since an advanced machine should be able to follow a changing tempo and insert anything where you need it, including ahead of or behind the beat since that sounds a lot more exciting.
A 12 tone pitch "corrector" will be seen as dumb old fashioned technology since a more advanced machine could impose any tuning scheme according to taste, many of which tuning schemes sound a lot better than 12 equal.
The same with compression which was necessary because the old archaic technology could not handle a wide dynamic range without distorting.
Music that never varies its tempo and is always right on the beat and which is in perfect 12 equal no matter what and which has no dynamic variation will be heard as dumb and out of style as the technology gets better than all that.
For right now the music industry thinks it has successfully dumbed the product down to its ongoing advantage, but I bet the party does not last because its no party, most such music sounds the same and it is deeply boring, competition will move on to better machines and not the crude machines of the past.
I've always hated Beethoven.
Why? Dude was pretty cool, all things considered.
Making wonky rhythmic changes to screw with the nobles at their little dance parties is something we should all aspire to do.
@@rainbowkrampus Not his fault his music has become a cliche.
I think you should stick to promoting and explaining interesting theories instead of whatever this was.
These kinds of musicology/music history videos are my bread and butter! Been doing them long before the microtonal stuff. Did you just disagree with this, or is there something else that bothered you with it? 😅
L take, loved this video
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