What is Gridifcation
A 50-year comparison of Billboard’s top songs shows how recorded music became machine-perfect.
Part One: Introduction
Something happened to recorded music over the last twenty-five years that most people can hear, and feel, but almost nobody has the language for. At the Musical Form Institute, we call this change gridification.
The simplest way to show what we mean is to listen.
Start with the top five songs on the Billboard Hot 100 from 1975:
1975 Billboard Hot 100 Top 5 Songs
No. Title Artist(s) 1 “Love Will Keep Us Together” Captain & Tennille 2 “Rhinestone Cowboy” Glen Campbell 3 “Philadelphia Freedom” Elton John 4 “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” Freddy Fender 5 “My Eyes Adored You” Frankie Valli
With the top five from 2025:
2025 Billboard Hot 100 Top 5 Songs
No. Title Artist(s) 1 “Die with a Smile” Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars 2 “Luther” Kendrick Lamar and SZA 3 “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” Shaboozey 4 “Lose Control” Teddy Swims 5 “Birds of a Feather” Billie Eilish
1975
Let’s start with Captain & Tennille’s Love Will Keep Us Together:
What hits me immediately on this track is that 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. Quite the opposite. Modern session players have incredible chops and extraordinary time. It is because modern music production now treats human temporal particularity as error in need of correction.
There is also a really remarkable rhythmic figure in the second-to-last measure of the chorus, a kind of herky-jerky shape, basically a sixteenth tied to a dotted eighth pattern. It would almost certainly not survive a modern pop production. A producer might smile at it, maybe even say they like it, but they would still ask for a few more passes, something simpler, you know, “don’t get in the way of the vocals,” and then playlist those takes in Pro Tools, with the simpler version making it into the final mix.
Also there is a fill into the bridge that is even more revealing. Hal Blaine rushes into it and then pulls the time right back. If you look at the tempo analysis, you can see this clearly. In a contemporary production workflow, that would certainly be grid-corrected during the mixing session.
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. But more on the stakes later in this introductory article.
2025
OK. Let’s look at the #1 hit song from 2025, Die With a Smile by Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga:
What hits me immediately is how perfect the vocals are. There are melodic leaps in the verse that are incredibly difficult to nail, and Bruno Mars is hitting every single note pitch-perfect and in absolutely perfect time.
When the drums come in, wow. Big, warm tom tones. Not much decay either, which is interesting, because a modern drum will usually ring unless you mute it with something like a handkerchief or MoonGel. To my ears, those tones sound controlled in post. And I also notice just how locked everyone is. Absolutely no separation between the kick and bass, and the guitar rhythms are right smack in there, just perfect time. I mean, to my trained ears, these are monster players who just delivered a performance at a level very few humans ever reach.
OK let’s do our tempo analysis:
I did not forget to copy and paste anything here. I performed the same exact tempo analysis for this song, and it produced zero tempo transitions. Down to, what is that, one ten-thousandth of a BPM?
Remarkable, right? A room full of musicians played together over the course of a roughly 4-minute song, and they are absolutely machine-perfect.
Well okay, we know no human being is capable of playing an instrument and maintaining a tempo with zero variance down to one ten-thousandth of a BPM, because we are human beings and not machines.
This is gridification.
You may have noticed that one song in the 2025 group has actual movement: Shaboozey’s A Bar Song (Tipsy). I was curious about that too, so I went looking for how it was made. In a Sound On Sound interview, the producers explain that the song began as a voice memo that Shaboozey sang with his guitar at the end of a long day in the studio. They then spent the next several days trying to recreate it with expensive microphones, but they could not capture that magical feel of that voice memo take. So instead of replacing it, they built the song around the voice memo.
I would wager people’s ears perked up because they were feeling something that almost all modern pop music has silenced: the objectification of lived time.
What is Gridification Then?
Gridification is when a human performance is treated as error in need of correction and turned into a machine-perfect representation of itself.
That means taking the performances of musicians in the studio and applying algorithmic quantization tools to the recorded audio after the fact.
It also includes grabbing a kick drum, a bass articulation, or any other performed element and sliding it into alignment with the rest of the song.
In other words, gridification is any post-production temporal adjustment to performed material after the performance has already happened.
Why Does This Matter
Music objectifies the way our feelings unfold and makes them available for our understanding. It presents forms of knowledge that words, mathematics, and propositional logic cannot express. The familiar claim that music is a universal language has its roots in this insight.
This understanding of music comes primarily from the American philosopher Susanne K. Langer, drawing on the work of Ernst Cassirer. For Langer, music is not an emotional symptom or a biological stimulus. It is a presentational symbol through which forms of felt life become publicly perceptible.
Our decisions are irreversible. We exist in time and in historical context, and all of our relations, private and social, are mediated by the ongoing negotiation of difference. Music carries knowledge of those forms: tension and resolution, growth and attenuation, conflict and coordination. It cultivates a sensitivity to how feeling unfolds in time.
Gridification denies us access to those forms of knowledge. More than that, it substitutes a corrupted symbolic representation of felt life, one defined by machinic precision and optimization. The music that surrounds us increasingly presents a morphology of unfolding that no human being actually inhabits.
This is why the Certificate of Embodied Production exists. If music's epistemic value lies in its presentation of coordinated human time, then the difference between a gridified recording and an embodied one is not a matter of taste. It is a matter of a legible world, a rational politics, a matter of whether we can still recognize each other as irreducible living beings in shared time. The CEP exists to make that difference legible again.
There is one more aspect to this that needs to be made explicit. When you gridify a performance, you silence the lives and voices of the artists who made it. The last twenty-five years have seen a rapid rise of gridification alongside a cultural revolution that rightly privileges the primacy of one’s own historically positioned voice. These two movements are incompatible. If you gridify a performance, or tune a vocal, you are not enhancing your positionality. You are erasing the history of your body and your place in time. What reaches the listener is not your voice. It is a machine-perfect representation of something, though it is hard to say of what. It is certainly not a person living in time and place.
