You might call it Virtual Funk. It’s the process whereby “feel” and “groove” in modern pop music have been progressively diverted from actual human performers and inserted into microcircuits. Contemporary dance music of all kinds–rap and hip hop, soul, pop, and hard rock–all now benefit from the triumph of the machine. If it seems paradoxical to you that music software programs now carry a “humanize” function, you are living in the past.
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The digital technologies of the 1980s have progressively eroded distinctions between human and automated performance and between natural and synthetic sounds. Drum machines and synthesizers no longer synthetically approximate particular sounds; now they exactly, digitally, reproduce the original sound. These days, there is often no way of distinguishing what a real keyboard player does from what a well-programmed machine can do. Short of being there in the studio to collect evidence, you’d be hard pressed in most cases to know whether the playing on your favorite album is flesh and blood or samples and chips.
Reactions to these developments are usually, well, reactionary. One instinct is to make a case for “real” sounds as “warmer” than artificial ones. I once bought a music software program and enjoyed a bewildering demonstration of how relative such values can be: the salesperson was pitching an additional package of tricks that converted the digital information (displayed via numbers) into an analog display (visualized as waveforms) that was, to him, unquestionably more “natural” and easy to understand. In fact, both systems were incomprehensible to me.
Some people believe that actual human performances are more spontaneous than machine-made music. (To maintain this belief, it does help if you haven’t been to a rock show for about ten years.) That would be true if machines didn’t generate their own happy accidents. In fact, you can jam with your software. Today’s musicians mess about with sequences, toy with samples, and sit waiting patiently for the software to do something strange they’ve never heard before. In any case, it has become almost impossible to tell automated and human performances apart. (Best drum lick of the year so far? The tom-tom fill in Electronic’s “Get the Message.” Is it human, a machine, or a sample? Who cares?) More remarkable still is the transformation of our perception of automated and electronic sounds: what once seemed “cold” now feels funky.
So next time you hear someone whining on about drum machines and computers and their negative effects on today’s music, consider this question: whoever said that there was anything natural about recording electric guitars in a 48-track studio?
