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 genres.

Why this matters beyond any one song

What emerged over time wasn’t a theory about tempo, but a way of seeing structure that most notation systems ignore. These measurements don’t replace listening; they make listening legible. They show that stability in music often lives at a second order — not in exact speeds, but in relationships between speeds. Once you see that, you start to notice it everywhere: in performance, in speech, in attention itself.

If these charts reveal anything, it’s not a hidden flaw in recorded music — it’s a hidden balance, one that only appears when you stop expecting time to behave like a grid.