The first practical drum machines started appearing in the very late 1970s and early 80s. Over the years, they became the foundation of genres like hip-hop, dance, and all flavours of EDM. But if you listen closely, you can hear the difference between a drum machine and a live drummer. It’s not necessarily in the tone and timbre of the sound, but the timing.
In the world of psychoacoustics—the study of how we perceive sound—there’s something called “micro-timing.” No live drummer, no matter how good, is 100% accurate from beat to beat and bar to bar. They’re close, but not the absolute perfect of a drum machine or some manufactured beats. The brain picks up on this micro-timing and treats them as extremely subtle emotional cues. This is how we perceive such amorphous things like the groove or mood of a song. It’s something you feel rather than hear.
Try it the next time you’re scrolling through your playlist.
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