digital Digital usually refers to something using discrete digits, often binary digits. Technology and computing Hardware *Digital electronics, electronic circuits which operate using digital signals ** Digital camera, which captures and stores digital ...

music Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspe ...

processing technology, quantization is the studio-software process of transforming performed

musical note In music, a note is the representation of a musical sound. Notes can represent the pitch and duration of a sound in musical notation. A note can also represent a pitch class. Notes are the building blocks of much written music: discretizatio ...

s, which may have some imprecision due to expressive performance, to an underlying musical representation that eliminates the imprecision. The process results in notes being set on beats and on exact fractions of beats. The purpose of quantization in music processing is to provide a more beat-accurate timing of sounds. Quantization is frequently applied to a record of

MIDI MIDI (; Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and ...

notes created by the use of a

musical keyboard A musical keyboard is the set of adjacent depressible levers or keys on a musical instrument. Keyboards typically contain keys for playing the twelve notes of the Western musical scale, with a combination of larger, longer keys and smaller, s ...

or drum machine. Additionally, the phrase "pitch quantization" can refer to pitch correction used in audio production, such as using

Auto-Tune Auto-Tune (or autotune) is an audio processor introduced in 1996 by American company Antares Audio Technologies. Auto-Tune uses a proprietary device to measure and alter pitch in vocal and instrumental music recording and performances. Auto-T ...

Description

A frequent application of quantization in this context lies within MIDI application software or hardware. MIDI sequencers typically include quantization in their manifest of edit commands. In this case, the dimensions of this timing grid are set beforehand. When one instructs the music application to quantize a certain group of MIDI notes in a song, the program moves each note to the closest point on the timing grid. Quantization in MIDI is usually applied to Note On messages and sometimes Note Off messages; some

digital audio workstation A digital audio workstation (DAW) is an electronic device or application software used for recording, editing and producing audio files. DAWs come in a wide variety of configurations from a single software program on a laptop, to an integr ...

s shift the entire note by moving both messages together. Sometimes quantization is applied in terms of a percentage, to partially align the notes to a certain beat. Using a percentage of quantization allows for the subtle preservation of some natural human timing nuances. The most difficult problem in quantization is determining which

rhythm Rhythm (from Greek , ''rhythmos'', "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") generally means a " movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions". This general meaning of regular re ...

ic fluctuations are imprecise or expressive (and should be removed by the quantization process) and which should be represented in the output score. For instance, a simple children's song should probably have very coarse quantization, resulting in few different notes in output. On the other hand, quantizing a performance of a piano piece by

Arnold Schoenberg Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (, ; ; 13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was as ...

, for instance, should result in many smaller notes, tuplets, etc. In recent years audio quantization has come into play, with the plug-in Beat Detective on all versions of

Pro Tools Pro Tools is a digital audio workstation (DAW) developed and released by Avid Technology (formerly Digidesign) for Microsoft Windows and macOS. It is used for music creation and production, sound for picture ( sound design, audio post-produ ...

being used regularly on modern-day records to tighten the playing of drums, guitar, bass, etc.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Quantization (Music) Audio editors Music production

Description

See also

References