I find this subject absolutely fascinating in part because of the complexity it embodies. In my career I’ve needed to deal with, embrace and at times, crush complexity so that the goals of the project could be met. Thousands of people do this daily across most any domain.

It appears that for this issue to truly be resolved, a technical definition for what a genre/style is, compatible with machine coding or machine searching has to be developed. For the Berklee Musicologists and other experts out there do you think developing such a crisp definition is even possible, say in the next 5 years or so? I have no doubts that at some point this will be solved.

I’ve pondered this question for only a few days now and I’m gaining a deeper appreciation for what the programmers at PG Music face when trying to create a robust Style Picker. I wouldn’t mind informally working on this problem with others. But I suspect we will face a wall very quickly when we realize that styles and genres are subsets of music and music embodies human emotion and various cultural contexts. Defining emotion and context algorithmically or even with neural nets or random forests will require much inter-disciplinary brain power. 1300 genres may not seem like a big number until you try to encode your 1st genre . . . like I say, fascinating subject.

The following is a small section taken from an article at ProMusicianHub.com, I think it’s a good read to help get your arms around this topic.

https://promusicianhub.com/what-is-music-genre/

“A music genre is a classification system that classifies music into different styles. It’s the art of incorporating instrumental and vocal tones in a structured manner that gives the music its distinctive character. As a result, all artistic compositions that belong to the same music genre share some similarities in form or style. The word genre is used in other forms of art, including literature, television, cinema, and other artistic creation types. It combines pieces of work that fit under a specific category after analyzing and highlighting the most distinctive elements.

In addition to pure genres, crossover genres are also popular. These combine several elements from different elements to create a new style that appeals to a wider audience. This technique is widely used in popular music. However, it’s quite common for a musical piece to belong to several genres at the same time. Music genres can refer to when the music was composed, its style, the instruments used and their functions, and the music’s geographical origin. In other words, there’s no one clear comprehensive definition that explains what different music genres are. Even within a single system, there is some disagreement about the interpretations of the elements used to categorize music composition.

For example, some researchers state that the Classical period which marks the creation and popularity of Classical music, lasted from 1730 or 1750 to 1830. However, some researchers say that this period started in the 1780s or later in the 1790s. Both interpretations are accepted.”

https://soundcloud.com/user-646279677
BiaB 2024 Windows
For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.