We are in the process of deconstructing our musical tastes to determine which aspects of our favorite genres are actually musical. As it turns out, lots of nonmusical information clutters our perception of what makes music enjoyable or not.- "My ex-girlfriend liked the free form jazz stylings of Bruno Mindhorn, so I think he sucks," or
- "No TRUE Scotsman would listen to Terminal Margaret!"
For the next couple of assignments, let's be especially aware of the boundary that exists between what we are talking about (e.g. music) and what narrative we use to talk about it (good versus bad, useful versus frivolous, moral versus immoral, structure versus chaos, etc). For a quick glimpse at a narrative-free description of musical genres, check out the Music Genome Project (the guts of the pandora algorithms).
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1 comment:
Damn. You got to Pandora before me. Still...
One of the interesting things to do with Pandora is to check out the qualities assigned to different pieces and look at why they were chosen for a given station. Because of the structure of the program, you're able to create, essentially, your own genres of music that aren't necessarily a part of any genre you might find on wikipedia.
However, one of the drawbacks I've personally found with it is that, like Josh says, alot of our definition of genre has to do with more than just the musical aspects of the piece. Topic, artist, time period... all of these can have their place in what we do and don't like about a given set of songs.
If you check out the wikipedia page for the Music Genome Project, you'll see it lists the attributes attributed by each of the annotators - and yes, each song on pandora has been hand annotated with each of those tags, apparently taking about 1/2 hour per song to get a full set down. In that list though, you'll find little about the lyrical content, and even less about the contextual origins of the music, i.e. whether it was produced during the late 70s in czechoslovakia.
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