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Topic: Genres and styles (Read 18592 times) previous topic - next topic
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Genres and styles

I'm trying to sort out my music in genres, but this seems not so easy an approach.

I'm thrilled by the categorizing from AMG and Discogs, but i'm confused by large differences between the two databases. It seem to me, that most genres are more correctly categorized in discogs, but AMG has better distinction of styles, although they are mostly applied to whole albums.

An example: Enigma
By AMG categorized as Genre "New Age" with styles "Ethnic Fusion, Club/Dance, Neo-Classical) but
by discogs categorized as Genre "Electronic" with styles "Ambient, Downtempo, Abstract"

Also there are Ishkur's guide to electronic music which might be a help in that particular genre.

Any suggestions?
Can't wait for a HD-AAC encoder :P

Genres and styles

Reply #1 –
I am just using some major categories like Rock, Electronic, Hi-Hop.....
And I am using the same genre for each artist/band.
 

Genres and styles

Reply #2 –
I use more general genres such as Alt. Rock, Hard Rock, Rock, Metal, Punk, Soundtrack, etc. I may eventually remove the information altogether.

It does seem to get progressively harder to classify certain music, as previous genres are blended, new styles and ridiculous terms for them are created and so on!

Categorisation by genre does not terribly interest me, especially since I'm so bad at it.

Genres and styles

Reply #3 –
I think you can never get it right. It is quite complex, open to discussion and often the result of personal opinion.

Moreover, it is culturally biased in some way. An American based site like AMG will have 1500 different categories for Rock and 2 for all flavours of Electronic (mild exageration  ) and often makes huge errors in the distinctions between 'House', 'Dance', 'Trance', 'Hardstyle', 'Progressive', 'Gabber', 'IDM' etc. etc.
Every night with my star friends / We eat caviar and drink champagne
Sniffing in the VIP area / We talk about Frank Sinatra
Do you know Frank Sinatra? / He's dead

Genres and styles

Reply #4 –
I use Wikipedia.

Genres and styles

Reply #6 –
I agree that it's hard to distinct between multiple genres, but that's why it's possible to assign multiple styles.

I think we need a common database where everyone are able to submit and change information for every track that exists. Every track should contain proper information (much like Discogs, but their data rely on independent releases), and styles could be assigned by users worldwide, much in the same way a wiki works.

This should be coupled with a acoustic fingerprint of the music (and eventually a short lofi sample). MusicBrainz does the fingerprinting already, but I've not really have much luck with it. AMG has it's own propetriary (and of course NOT free) LASSO service which actually binds music to their database!

Embedded with this unique identification of every song could be: user tracking, like foosic/last.fm and even users rating and mood descriptions (there was a description of the 1-3 mood energy-rating somewhere here), or even more precise like MoodLogic, and even the famous LyricsDB

For digital music I can highly recommend Ishkur's guide, which has many examples of the many different styles and genres, which has lead me to this.
Can't wait for a HD-AAC encoder :P

Genres and styles

Reply #7 –
An upgrade for our very own Foosic, perhaps?

Genres and styles

Reply #8 –
Quote from: dv1989 on
An upgrade for our very own Foosic, perhaps?

Maybe. I'm not familar with it's fingerprint system, but at first sight it's database was badly unorganized

My new phone (SE W850i) utilizes Gracenote TrackID - It only needs 10 sec to determine a track and are very insensitive to background noises! That's a reliable fingerprint service
Can't wait for a HD-AAC encoder :P

Genres and styles

Reply #9 –
This is the scheme I've decided on for my music:

<genre> <subgenre>

genre = Rock, Classical, Jazz, Pop, Electronic, Comedy, Blues, Metal, Noise, Punk, Trip-Hop, Opera
Rock subgenres = "& Roll" (original rock), Classic, Industrial, Grunge, Alt, Avant-Garde, Britpop, Emo, Funk, Indie, New Wave, Post, Progressive
Metal subgenres = Funk, Heavy, Hip-Hop, Progressive, Rap
Punk subgenres = Classic, Alt, Post, Progressive
Classical subgenres = Classical (not a typo), Baroque, Romantic, Neo, Modern
Electronic subgenres = Dance and Non-Dance (scandalous, I know)
Jazz, Blues, Comedy, Noise, Trip-Hop, Opera subgenres = (haven't fleshed my collection out here yet, so no subgenres)

Some examples:

Stereolab = Rock Post
Primus = Metal Funk
Pink Floyd = Rock Progressive
Boulez Conducts Zappa = Classical Modern

It's not a particularly well thought out system, but so far it's working acceptably well. The key points here are that a) the genre must go before the subgenre, because music players use naive alphanumeric sorting when you browse by genre, and I want all classes of one genre to appear together; and b) unique genre identifiers should be localized based on both cultural lines and on listening lines. Thus, Metal and Punk and Opera, etc get their own genres entirely, even though you could argue that they ought to fit in other genres (Rock and Classical). And even though electronic music has a few billion different subgenres, all it really boils down to is whether you're supposed to dance to it or nod your head to it, and by and large, my musical tastes at any given time are only going to go towards one or the other, and no more specific.

Obviously this system gets extended with more subgenres as I get more music. But as far as any textual scheme to represent an album genre, I'd say this is as good a system as anybody's.

Genres and styles

Reply #10 –
... progressive... punk? o.O
err... i'm not using windows any more ;)

Genres and styles

Reply #11 –
Pronk is for the most part a genre exclusively reserved for the Cardiacs. Although I'm not pleased with the hubris involved with putting a band in its own genre, try as I may, I can't think of any other genre that fits better.

Genres and styles

Reply #12 –
I thought Punk and Progressive were opposites.
err... i'm not using windows any more ;)

Genres and styles

Reply #15 –
Enigma is much closer to AMG's definition than Discogs'. I'm usually pretty content with Discogs' genre and style definitions, but every once in a while they're pretty bogus.

There are a lot of artists who really defy easy classification. Like Shpongle, for example. Is Shpongle psybient or psydub (say psytrance and I may be forced to bring out my red-hot buggering iron)? I've heard psydub (and really, it fits better), but the former seems to be a bit more prevalent.

Axon, your electronic classification is hardly scandalous. There are some tracks that are very obviously made for dancing and some that are very obviously made for not dancing. One of the styles I've been trying to start tagging with is "Dance". It makes for easy selection of a broad range of genres for doing DJ mix track selection, especially for my genre-straddlers.

Me? I use my own judgement and my own experience. I've actually created my own names for styles that seemed to group together before, although I really try to avoid neologism. Most artists tend to self-classify into a genre anyhow. Discogs is pretty accurate for most cutting-edge electronic stuff.

Genres and styles

Reply #16 –
Quote from: Canar on
Enigma is much closer to AMG's definition than Discogs'.
...and closer to AMG than Ishkur's slight definition. I've been checking out his guide, which appearently splits up music in just 2 genres: electronic music... and anything played on a acoustic instrument I guess. Also he chooses to define most mainstream music today as styles to "House", even Rap and R&B (Odd definition - I have to get used to this!)

Then again, he also made a very specific style to put all dancable cover tracks in a corner  I hope he makes up for that in his v3.

The way he categorizes most music could lay a good foundation for my style choosing, with the root categories as "Genre" and as many different definitions as "Styles" that may apply to a track. Although it may be a bit too specific and hard to distinct with every track, and his grouping could be easier to apply, and then make mix-playlists that would cover "what i like to hear now".

I think it's time for me to write my PHP script to gather info from both AMG and Discogs to a DB and automatically tag my files
Can't wait for a HD-AAC encoder :P

Genres and styles

Reply #17 –
Maybe a large part of the ambiguity of genres is merely because their meaning is ambivalent. That is, genres represent both the culture and time when the music was created (the "historical" genre), and the "emotional" classification of the music on playback - when you're in a particular mood, you want to listen to a general class of music (the "emotional" genre). The two meanings aren't really the same. There are about a billion different subgenres of electronic, each representing a different group of people with different cultures, and yet, I can classify it down to "dance" and "non-dance", and that's basically all I need to know. Or, you can classify classical down to all the various ages and movements, but for most people, classical music == classical music. This represents the facts that: the distinctions largely do not matter for most people when listening, and that when one is looking for a general class of music, further distinctions are counterproductive.

The upshot is that the "historical" genre is based on historical fact and is falsifiable, but the "emotional" genre is completely relativistic, and much of the debate over how to classify something rests on emotional lines.

Genres and styles

Reply #18 –
IMHO the whole genre idea is flawed.

A much more useful approach is the typical Web 2.0 (buzzword alert  ) style of tagging.

Check out http://www.last.fm/music/Enigma/+tags for example.

Genres and styles

Reply #19 –
caligae: http://www.last.fm/music/Shpongle/+tags = psytrance as second most popular entry. RED-HOT BUGGERING IRON TIME!

Seriously though, people are stupid. People in large groups are much stupider. Look at the retard incest-fest that is Digg if you want proof of that. Shpongle is NOT psytrance. Shpongle is psydub (I think that's how Simon classifies it anyhow), and psydub to me could be easily be a subgenre of psybient(which seems to be the populist classification), despite the poor definitions of both.

odyssey: I know Ishkur personally, to some degree. He lives near the capital of my province, I live in the north. We frequent many of the same events. His guide is a good place to start learning about the various and sundry subgenres of electronic music, but a horrible place to go for reference. He is definitely pushing a bit of an agenda... I have a few other ad hominem comments I could make about the guy, but I'll avoid them. Suffice to say, Discogs is better.

Axon: That's exactly what I mean. It's all utterly subjective anyhow. I use what makes sense to me for my purposes of classification. Using one "populist" genre and a bunch of subjective subcategorizable styles seems to be the most sensible way to do things as far as I can see. That way, you can bridge across the populist genres with descriptors. For example, there is a lot of music being made that uses acid styles these days, in many different genres. Industrial, EBM, IDM, Rock (Ozric Tentacles anyone?)... and more.

Genres and styles

Reply #20 –
I suppose, then, that "genre" should only represent the historical environment the music was created in, and be no more and no less descriptive. I was thinking that a tag-heavy style like last.fm would work better for emotional classifications. That lets Canar be happy, AND people can still call Shpongle psytrance!

Genres and styles

Reply #21 –
Sounds right to me, Axon. I'll deal with the psytrance crowd one sphincter at a time.

Genres and styles

Reply #22 –
I guess I'm the only one here who never understood the whole concept of spending time trying to define genres. "Is it this or is it that?" I never even bother with them. Don't use them at all. Makes it really simple!

Genres and styles

Reply #23 –
Quote
The upshot is that the "historical" genre is based on historical fact and is falsifiable, but the "emotional" genre is completely relativistic, and much of the debate over how to classify something rests on emotional lines.


That's a very good argument. I agree.



Quote
Sounds right to me, Axon. I'll deal with the psytrance crowd one sphincter at a time.


Do you know of how many times I had re-edit the wikipedia article, because of all of these "scenes". I wrote a little bit about the musicology in Goa Vs. Psy. Something that pretentious music snobs don't bother to do and what happened to it. Some stupid fool removed it. Goddamn wikipedia.
budding I.T professional

Genres and styles

Reply #24 –
The one thing that proves is that Wikipedia is silly.