When Music Still Doesn't Hold
I didn’t begin by trying to prove that recorded music changes speed. I began by trying to survive it. As a pianist , I kept running into the same quiet problem: I could play the notes correctly and still feel disoriented. Drummers would say my time was “off,” but no one could explain what that meant beyond vague metaphors . So instead of arguing with feel, I started measuring placement — first crudely, then obsessively — not to expose mistakes, but to orient myself inside the music. Why the charts came after listening The charts came later. Long before spreadsheets or visualizations , there was repetition: playing the same passage again and again and noticing that the music itself was never standing still. Certain moments leaned forward, others settled back, and entire sections behaved differently depending on emotional weight . When I finally graphed these performances , the surprise wasn’t that they fluctuated — it was how consistently they did so, across artists, eras, and ...
