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I don't think we'd recreate film grain, but I think some form of artifacts would exist and people would eventually grow a taste for them. Modern digital music

I don't think we'd recreate film grain, but I think some form of artifacts would exist and people would eventually grow a taste for them. Modern digital music can be completely clean and flawless. But it can also have some weird artifacts that can only exist digitally, like aliasing, stuttering from a corrupt file or skipping CD player, compression artifacts while streaming or from very low bitrate sources. And nowadays we're seeing genres like Hyperpop, Glitch Hop, and Future Bass which all play with these artifacts. Flume even has a song[0] where you can hear the distinctive whine of an improperly grounded USB audio interface. It's inserted into a silent part of the song, so it is 100% intentional and not an accident in the recording. I like to think he's giving a little wink-wink to other music producers. It's on the "My Name is Flume Mixtape" album, which itself is a great example of intentional digital artifacts in a creative use. There's lots of aliasing on things that shouldn't, and things that "should" alias like square waves sliding into the 10khz range are perfectly alias free. [0] Amber at 1:51. The ringing sound that comes in after the first bass hit is also some sort of ground noise, but very distorted. https://youtu.be/RM2cNhVep40 https://youtu.be/RM2cNhVep40

brokenmachine 4y ago
Agree, just thought I'd mention that there are zillions of plugins to add these kinds of distortion/noise (like vinyl noise, ground noise, tape distortion, etc). Eg Devious Machines Texture, U-He Satin, etc, etc. Also most modern synths have noise oscillators for this purpose (eg Serum, Pigments, etc, etc). Things just sound too clean and perfect/boring if you don't use some kind of saturation/noise or distortion for ear candy. As an aside, I'm pretty sure Skrillex puts CamelPhat on his master bus. The music video for one of his songs was his Ableton set and it was shown in there.
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  Good point, I should have emphasized that it can be perfectly clean, but it often sounds like it's missing something, so it's usually made dirtier afterwards. I just wonder if the reason it sounds like it's missing something is because subtle noise and saturation sound objectively better to human ears, or if it's just because that's the precedent that's been set and we've grown fond of it. Early music was recorded to tape by necessity, and the digital era tries to bring those subtle distortions back to sound like it. Even a teen who has never listened to older music recorded to tape still listens to modern music that tries to sound like it was recorded to tape or passed through saturating transformers. I think the uptick of intentional digital artifacts in music shows that we grow fond of what we're used to experiencing, even if it's considered a negative in an objective sense. But we can't ever really prove that without a separate society that somehow skipped the entire analog music (or film) era. Also yeah Skrillex really breaks all the typical rules but his mixes sound fantastic (or garbage, depending on your opinion. His stuff is really divisive). The hosts of The Mastering Show podcast thought his youtube video was fake because of how much saturation and limiting he uses. I'm pretty certain it's totally real.
  - brokenmachine 4y ago
    I think it's because we've evolved in nature to appreciate natural sounds, which always have distortion, harmonics and noise. There's nothing that would generate perfect sine/sawtooth waves or perfect, undistorted echoes. So anything else just sounds unnatural/robotic. I think it's the same with film grain, looking at flat perfectly polished surfaces can seem boring and unnatural to the eye.

brokenmachine 4y ago

Agree, just thought I'd mention that there are zillions of plugins to add these kinds of distortion/noise (like vinyl noise, ground noise, tape distortion, etc). Eg Devious Machines Texture, U-He Satin, etc, etc. Also most modern synths have noise oscillators for this purpose (eg Serum, Pigments, etc, etc). Things just sound too clean and perfect/boring if you don't use some kind of saturation/noise or distortion for ear candy. As an aside, I'm pretty sure Skrillex puts CamelPhat on his master bus. The music video for one of his songs was his Ableton set and it was shown in there.

squeaky-clean 4y ago
Good point, I should have emphasized that it can be perfectly clean, but it often sounds like it's missing something, so it's usually made dirtier afterwards. I just wonder if the reason it sounds like it's missing something is because subtle noise and saturation sound objectively better to human ears, or if it's just because that's the precedent that's been set and we've grown fond of it. Early music was recorded to tape by necessity, and the digital era tries to bring those subtle distortions back to sound like it. Even a teen who has never listened to older music recorded to tape still listens to modern music that tries to sound like it was recorded to tape or passed through saturating transformers. I think the uptick of intentional digital artifacts in music shows that we grow fond of what we're used to experiencing, even if it's considered a negative in an objective sense. But we can't ever really prove that without a separate society that somehow skipped the entire analog music (or film) era. Also yeah Skrillex really breaks all the typical rules but his mixes sound fantastic (or garbage, depending on your opinion. His stuff is really divisive). The hosts of The Mastering Show podcast thought his youtube video was fake because of how much saturation and limiting he uses. I'm pretty certain it's totally real.
- brokenmachine 4y ago
  I think it's because we've evolved in nature to appreciate natural sounds, which always have distortion, harmonics and noise. There's nothing that would generate perfect sine/sawtooth waves or perfect, undistorted echoes. So anything else just sounds unnatural/robotic. I think it's the same with film grain, looking at flat perfectly polished surfaces can seem boring and unnatural to the eye.