To some extent, music and math have always been one and the same. The first time some caveman counted to four, he probably beat it out on a hollow log so that he could remember it, and both music and math were born. These days, the caveman is gone from music, though. A computer beats the log in perfect time.

My latest explorations and experiments with MIDI have shed light on my own long-term general disdain for commercial music. Now I understand completely why I liked Black Flag, Minor Threat, and Jimi Hendrix when most of the other kids were listening to Duran Duran or Van Halen: Since 1983, commercial music has been perfectified to the point that I'm not even sure if you can call it music anymore; it's more like amplified clock ticks. If you want anything primal or vital (in the sense of "living"), you either have to listen to stuff recorded before 1983 (and not "digitally remastered" in certain ways) or to non-commercial music.

It's a pity so many good songs have been ruined by MIDIfication. Long ago, before Gwen Stefani was a big-shot, I saw her perform with No Doubt at a tiny little place in Denver. They rocked the hou', and after the show, everybody was like, "They're gonna be huge." It was an "I was there when..." thing for me to see them at that little club, but later their recorded, engineered stuff disappointed me deeply -- it lacked the vitality of the live show. The songs were still good, but somehow I didn't like them. I could never quite put my finger on the reason for this until last week when I really started to dive into the guts of MIDI and see how it's done.

Basically, MIDI is just math. You break everything up ("quantize") into units, and then you can do whatever you want to it. You break your bar into (for example) 32 chunks and you can place a note/chord/sound on each of those chunks either through playing an instrument with a midi signal or just by placing notes on the grid. You can further break it down by quantizing any particular sound on the grid; it's quite fractal.

Once you have your progression (grid) just-so, you place it at the appropriate place in the song (matrix). So you do your intro, verse, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus, verse, outro (or whatever), drop each piece into the matrix and -- voila! -- a song, a perfect song with the crash synced up to the hundredth of a millisecond with the striking of the big chord.

But human drummers -- and I don't care how good they are -- will be off by a tenth of a second here and there. That gives human music a certain "swing" that you'll never get in MIDI music. MIDI just makes it too easy to be perfect, even in "live" performance.

Song written in D but you want to hear it in G#? No need to noodle around with your guitar translating all the chords and notes (or cheating and using a capo), just change the MIDI key and the deed is done. Let MIDI be your capo. Want to bend that one note to perfection? No problem -- quantize it and do with it as you wish. Want to make the guitar less trashy or the bass fatter? Adjust the MIDI instrument. Want to change the mood while leaving the effects in place? Quantize differently. Want to make that guitar solo lightning fast? Drop more notes in with a few clicks of the mouse. No need to develop those weird little muscles in your fingers that only guitarists develop.

It's super-duper easy. The hardest part about MIDI engineering is plugging everything into the rack correctly. I cranked out three perfect, multitrack songs yesterday, and I'm a complete novice. You would never even know that these songs were made without their creator ever having touched an actual musical instrument. The bass, guitar, drums, and keys are all mixed in and sequenced just-so, played perfectly in-tune and on-key. It's the cleanest, most professional stuff I've ever done, for sure... and I hate it.

So I asked myself, "Would the Beatles have used MIDI?" The answer is, of course, "Of course!" They worked with any tool technology put in their hands. So that leaves me in a tough spot. On the one hand, my great love is real music played by actual human beings, brave music that plumbs the psychic depths: Muddy Waters, James Brown, Fela, wild hippy drum circles, rappers kickin' it freestyle to home-grown beatboxin', good ol' boys lighting up the hills on a summer night with fiddles, banjos, washboards and whatever else they can find to make sound. On the other hand, another part of the mind finds mathematical perfection sublime.

Where does the twain meet?

Finding an answer to that question is my new mission in life: How would the Beatles have incorporated MIDI to make music that rocks the whole brain and the whole world? I have some ideas. Now I just need to find the mic time.

Speaking of which, one of the saddest offshoots of MIDIfication of popular music is that live music has gone nearly extinct in the pop world. Almost everybody lip-syncs or fakes it in one way or another, and they have to because people have come to expect "perfection." That's very sad. Live music should be full of surprises. The pros play through their "mistakes" and transform them into things of beauty. Listen to Coltrane or (live) Jerry Garcia -- they always sound like the wheels are about to come off, but they recover by keeping the groove going; that's what you never get with MIDI because it's mathematical, not instinctual. Not to say that you couldn't play a MIDI signal raw and live -- people do all the time -- but in the interest of keeping it real, you'd just be using MIDI as an effects rig, not a timekeeper or platform for engineering. That would be a waste because you'd lose something in translating from MIDI to audio; why not just play pure audio?

That being said, MIDI itself is perfect, and I back this claim up by pointing out that MIDI has remained the standard for over 20 years in the highly fickle worlds of both technology and music. Learning how to use this tool has been both arduous and wonderful, as are most learning experiences. Now I just need to figure out how to humanize so that the tool doesn't become a crutch.

Even if I never succeed in marrying the mojo to the math, at least I know why commercial music has felt so emotionally empty for the past 20 years or so: It's all math. Dr. Spock has been running the Enterprise. It's time for Captain Kirk to take the helm again and discover some new planet where cavemen still beat out four-counts on hollow logs.