‘Representing Musical Genre: A State of the Art'

http://www.jj-aucouturier.info/papers/JNMR-2003.pdf

In this article, the concept of the music genre has been analysed and deconstructed, revealing the horribly flawed but inevitably necessary nature of classifying music by genre. The article is very long and as it goes on, becomes very mathematical and difficult to read. However the opening exchanges are extremely interesting and increasingly relevant in our modern world.

As the article outlines in its first line, genre is “probably the most popular music descriptor.” Throughout the era of popular music, people have felt the need to categorize music into set genres so as to associate any given artist or album within a particular arbitrary grouping, allowing some sort of easy-reference description of what would otherwise be difficult to understand within the everyday world.

The idea of intentional and extensional genre classification is a new and interesting one which makes a lot of sense. Intentionally, genre is reflective of sociocultural factors as opposed to actual musicological factors. Songs, usually helped by an imprudent connotation of the artist as a whole, are represented by a communal interpretation. Many of the ideas associated with our first assignment, those of the place of music within society and humanity, are validated here. Meanwhile extensional genre classification involves an on the surface more accurate account of the particular musical details of something. Generally I find that intentional classification, while important as it creates much of the cultural iconicity associated with songs such as Stairway To Heaven, is unhealthy and misleading in relation to placement in a particular musical genre. Extensional classification has merits as it is some sort of attempt to seriously analyse the traits of the piece or artist involved, however even this method is fundamentally flawed. Artists tend to be given particular classifications, and while this can sometimes involve a list of three of four genres, this takes an audience without experience of the artist no closer to truly knowing the sound of the band. Overall music is too complex, or “automatic”, to ever be able to define by arbitrary parameters no matter the effort involved.

Genre is criticized as “intrinsically ill-defined” within the article. This is a sentiment I agree with. While genre has always been around as a concept, the modern direction of society and technology has made the concept both more important, and more dangerous. In the modern world of passive pop cultural human subjects and expanding fields of music, it has become necessary to provide specific genres and even more shaky associations to ‘similar sounding artists’ to allow the everyday listening to find and identify music. The advent of and music sharing technologies, in tandem with a seeming cultural obsession with the concept of ‘genre’, has meant that mp3 files of music often need to come with a genre classification embedded as part of the file’s tagging, creating even more misinformation. This modern environment has also resulted in a huge blossoming of genre titles. Distributors and reviewers of music now have a plethora of hundreds of genres to choose from. Many of these completely manmade definers of music involve a ridiculous crossover of existing ‘base’ genre types. These are clearly so over the top and arbitrary and show how largely useless the concept of genre has become in modern times.

Despite its fallibility thought, genre overall is in fact important to an extent, but primarily within individual songs. A majority of artists who have existed for any length of time would have a large variety in their sound, surely to such an extent that they are impossible to classify simply. Any artist who is unoriginal and uncreative enough to easily classify in one word, probably isn’t worth the time and effort to listen to their music. Without genre, the very fabric of music distribution and consumption would fall apart in such a homogenized western culture. In my opinion the problem lies in the imbalance between the two uses of genre. Extensional classification of music is the primary constructive use of genre classification as it does contain some form of formal study of the structures involved, even if this should only ever be attempted to a simple and vague extent. While intentional classification, which is for all intents and purposes misguided in terms of ‘establishing genre’ as it’s defines, operates as the prevalent mode by which the general public associate music. These associations are undeniably important, the most important part of music in fact, but they have a damaging effect when coupled with the concept of genre. In the grand scheme, whatever human-given genre something apparently falls in should have no bearing on the sonic experience, but the arbitrary and often wholly inaccurate genres given for something, create unfortunate stereotypes and associations.

Overall genre is something which is inevitable within the data basing of music, but must always be eyed with a certain skepticism and will never in reality do justice to what it tried to pigeonhole.