Groove as technology and the technologies of groove

I will show how the rapid development of 'groove technologies' has, on the one hand, made the form and nature of this perceptual phenomenon more apparent and, on the other, profoundly influenced the aesthetics of rhythm in contemporary popular music. This influence has been exerted along two lines: the first is that of machinic regularity, that is, the generation of perfectly isochronous rhythms that differ from human performance in terms of temporal precision and accuracy of repetition; the second is the possibility of designing very sophisticated grooves with temporal and timbral characteristics that do not attempt to mimic human performance at all but exceed it in terms of complexity. If machines were once used to emulate and replace the rhythms played by humans as realistically as possible, we will see how today there are some musicians who try to reproduce live the perfection of machinic rhythms.