okay, so here I am half an eternity later - musicians music: I think there are two genres of musicians music, but they are actually the same, the showcase of incredible skill. Like, musicians claim to like the Paganini caprices, but if they have any honesty in their bodies, they will admit that they sound terrible. No one likes listening to a Paganini Caprice, EVEN when played by a very very skilled musician, they are not pretty music. Difficult music, interesting music, but not pretty. But it is cerebral, it's an active, thinking kind of appreciation, we like them because of the underlying context that we have the vocabulary to identify. Like puns in a foreign language or something. And maybe it can be hard to turn off the part of your brain that takes in all that analytic part of Listening To Music As A Musician, and then pop, for example, can get boring and repetetive very quickly, unless you re-learn how to just listen and appreciate how it sounds. Now, back in the olden days when we recorded on tape and studio time was almost prohibitively expensive, instead of just expensive as it is today, the most valued studio musicians were the ones who were almost supernaturally perfect at it - in time, in tune, with consistent timbre and rubato and vibrato and all the things, so they could go in and record it from the top three times, and that would be enough for the engineer to have everything they needed for a good frankentake to send to mastering. It should also, preferably, not have to much 'personality', because the studio musicians are just putting down the music the singer is going over. They were extremely skilled musicians, and a few clusters of them also had their own bands, playing their own music, where they got to headline - but most of those never got anywhere particular, because to the audience, it was Too Perfect. (Now, of course, the better the musician, the more likely there'll be mistakes in recorded materials, because the better the musician, the more likely they are to have gone in and done it from the top twice, and no more, unlike the types who'd have punched in everything eleven times over) And Too Perfect, without the context of how hecking hard that is to do, sounds bland and boring. Perfect for a singer to put some personality over. Perfect for a film soundtrack where the focus is character and dialogue. But Boring on its own. That is the second genre of musician music. I think the advent of digital recording and the digital sound processing tools we have available to us now will change the perception of this second genre of musicians music - because with digital recording you can do proper punching in, recording the song one line at a time, several times over, not just taking the best bits from a few full takes, and with digital processing tools we fix tempo and timing so that it always hits perfectly, and we pitch correct so that everything is always in tune (none of this means the musicians aren't skilled, the better the raw material the better the engineered end product, pitch correction and timing adjustments can make a good singer great, but not make a bad singer good, and using the tools themselves is part of the artform itself) will this make the General Public(tm) more habituated to (borderline) boring music without unintentional quirks, and will that mean that, if one can find the masters for those studio bands that music wouldn't read as boring anymore? I think yes, because this 'perfection' of a sort is now available to everyone recording, and not just a display of skill that only the top of the top among studio musicians can do, and a lot of what we think of as pretty or beautiful and enjoyable is a matter of habituation. You can always get an applause at a concert by playing a song the audience knows, even if it isn't a very good song, because recognition is important.

Digital recording means we aren't limited to literal tape, so ALL music we hear recorded will be punched in, have many many many many takes, will be in tune and in time. (something something the limitations of the medium is what we recognise it for 'sounds better on vinyl' my ass, but there is a character to vinyl, and it is all the ways in which is isn't good at capturing the fullness of sound)

And lastly, I will defend autotune to my dying day. Pitch correction is good, if you can hear the 'autotune' then it was done intentionally as an effect box (usually a vocoder style thing), have some fucking respect for audio engineers, they know what they're doing and can hear the same thing you can. (if I never see another shinee fan go 'why all the autotune, they don't need it' again it will still be too soon, it's AN EFFECT, you are free to not like it, but that doesn't mean it was a mistake)

-🎺

🎺 anon i was JUST thinking about you!!! thank you for finally coming in with this, this is so fascinating!!

it's really interesting how now in the age of ever perfectable digital creation, that the evidence of the error, the human is becoming more and more desirable as an aesthetic (or aural) choice. there's a quote from someone that i cannot remember for the life of me that paraphrased reads something along the lines of what we saw as inherent flaws in analogue media are now desirable as nolstalgic and aesthetic choices, in specific reference to things like film grain, crt refresh lines, and video glitches. in contemporary art circles you see a lot of people who are heavily focused on medium or concept based work that very often makes use of older analogue methods on purpose. i have two friends who both do 'slow process' photography, as in one of them shoots with a tintype camera and does only old school chemical processing, and the other does experimental chemical processing using natural materials. and maybe it's because i am an artist and have been one all my life, but the strive for perfection doesn't have the same draw for me anymore because it's now so easily accessible. i like to see the flaws, to see the evidence that it was made. and it absolutely makes sense that there would be parallels within the music field as well.