Defining a Standard Music Genre Tree.
May 15, 2007
A quick Google search for “Music Genre Tree” does not provide immediate results to give me an indication that there is much work being done in defining a standard music genre tree. The following statement, found in wikipedia, makes a good point regarding the difficulty to create such a tree:
“These classifications are often arbitrary and controversial, and closely related styles often overlap. Many do not believe that generic classification of musical styles is possible in any logically consistent way, and also argue that doing so sets limitations and boundaries that hinder the development of music.”
While I agree with the above statement, I still believe that an argument can be made for the necessity of genre trees. In fact, many music sites have created their own genre trees. Having a standard will allow sites and/or software programs to be more compatible when “speaking” to each other.
To demonstrate that creating such a tree will not be a trivial task, I have taken all the sub-genres listed under hip-hop for three popular music sites:
- Alternative Rap
- Dirty South
- East Coast Rap
- Freestyle
- Gangsta Rap
- Old School
- Turntablism
- Underground Hip-Hop
- West Coast Rap
- Alternative/Underground Hip-Hop
- Classic/Old School Hip-Hop
- East Coast Rap
- Hardcore/Reality Rap
- International Rap
- Latin Rap
- Pop/Crossover Rap
- Southern Rap
- Various
- West Coast Rap
- Bass
- Christian Rap
- East Coast
- Experimental Rap
- Gangsta & Hardcore
- International Rap
- Latin Rap
- Old School
- Pop Rap
- Rap Rock
- Southern Rap
- West Coast
From this small sample of sites we see common patterns, Dirty South, East Coast, Old School were all present on all three sites. However, we also see vast differences: there are hip-hop sub-genres that only appear on one site (ie. Turntablism, Rap Rock, Christian Rap, and Freestyle). Other arguing points would be to place Latin Rap under the international sub-genre. Furthermore, one can make the case that the international category should not exist – if an international sub-genre exists this means that the root level is reserved for one particular nation, defeating the purpose of ‘Standard’. We quickly realize from this sample the complexity in creating a standard genre tree. At the very least, we should start discussing these points and strive for a standard.
The road map for creating such a tree would be to compile the existing genre trees from the top music sites and extract the common patterns. From these common patters, or genre leaves, we can create the Standard Music Genre Tree version 1.0. Next, we end up with the inconsistencies between sites and start discussing what genres should, or should not, be included and where these genre leaves/nodes should be located in the tree.
I’ll log my progress regarding this genre tree on this blog.
update May 02, 2009: I have setup a site for the standard music genre tree project: http://www.musicgenretree.com
Entry Filed under: Music Genre Tree. .
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1.
Mauricio Roa | June 27, 2007 at 1:55 am
Hi:
Interesting ang huge effort. If you create some sort of CDDB for music genres, you will be famous. There are several attempts with AI to solve this problem. I’m trying to classify my music collections, but is the classification made by artits, or made by song? Sure, more simple by artist, but the music genre is not always the same for the same artist.
Good look with your music taxonomy efforts.
Mauricio. Chile.
2.
digitalmusiccollector | June 27, 2007 at 2:32 am
Oh yes, I am fully aware of how difficult this task is. At the very least, I would like to get the ball rolling. There are many advantages in having one universal tree – the work will be worth it. – cesar.
3.
mapmaker | October 31, 2007 at 1:13 am
I’ve been working on this kind of thing as well. I noticed that there was no comprehensive way of distinguishing the various genre’s of music. So i began mapping parts out. I’m not very well versed in music post 1980, but i feel I’m getting a handle on the genre’s from 1910-1979
4.
Jeremy | November 30, 2007 at 1:09 pm
Using hip hop as an example; where would you categorize an east coast rapper who sounded more like west coast. In my opinion those two categories shouldn’t exist in a music genre tree. Only your ears should be used to categorize a song, not your knowledge of the artists location, age or even their usual style.
5.
Benito | December 6, 2007 at 4:07 am
I’m very much interested in this effort. I’ve been looking around for a music genre tree myself, there’s an extensive page on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_popular_music_genres), but it’s just a list, and what I was looking for was what you call a “music genre tree”. It’s indeed like you say, no two websites will use the same classification…
I’ll be back here to check on your progress. I intend to use the music genre tree for making a musical discussion forum. You can always e-mail me, maybe we can work together on this.
6.
Jocke | January 23, 2008 at 5:56 am
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_genre#Categorisation Maybe interesting?
7.
kalais | June 5, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Interesting. Is anybody still pursuing this? I would like to follow it.
Myself and my business partner are developing a software platform which is meant for Service Development in SME’s, but it may happily apply to this task.
Personal thoughts:
1 geological origin of the music is a search-able aspect, but not one which defines the genre.
2 tempo of the music would be the primary point of departure for defining most genres – i.e. true hip hop will alway fall between 80-110bpm (or whatever it is…)
8.
digitalmusiccollector | June 6, 2008 at 12:46 am
I have in mind a wiki-like web application where registered users will start creating The standard genre tree. Anyone who wishes to contribute will be able to do so. I already have a domain name for this (http://wwww.songnodes.com), all i need to do is write the app and launch it : ) More details, soon.
9.
Jay | June 15, 2008 at 12:48 pm
While I have been pining for something like this for quite some time now, I think there is one huge consideration you need to account for with any project like this: artists don’t like to fall under convenient labels!! Any artist would be strongly opposed to some form of universal genre tree for this very reason since it stifles the very idea of creativity.
10.
digitalmusiccollector | June 15, 2008 at 11:50 pm
Very good point, Jay. I was thinking more towards the genre-tree being song-centric, and not artist-centric. Which means that I create the tree where all the nodes represent a genre, then sprinkle *songs* under each node. However, even this can pose some problems because a song can belong to more than one genre – in this case, the application should allow for songs to belong to more than one genre.
11. musicgenretree.com « Digital Music Collector | June 20, 2008 at 4:14 am
[...] 20, 2008 About a year ago I posted my idea regarding a standard music genre tree. Since then, I’ve been sketching out my ideas regarding such a tree. Bascially, my idea [...]
12.
zeb | July 15, 2008 at 7:56 pm
If it can be done for the plant and animal kingdoms – why not music? (Except maybe without the Latin
I’d pay money for a plug-in to my Helium Music Manager that could access this hypothetical standardized genera database and clean up my categorization disaster… Genres aren’t a marketing ploy to trap artists – they are a convenience to the listener as we explore avenues of the musical world. We currently have no reliable street maps!!
Perhaps a system of open clients like scrobbler could be devised to allow the public to pseudo-vote on what genres each song belongs to? Aggregate the statistics and let the numbers decide from a carefully complied (massive) “standardized” tree. Specify limiting rules to prevent the genera list from bloating out of control (We don’t need “Paul’s Metal” or “True Punk” – genres lacking any academic or cultural pedigree…) And you’ve got yourself a valuable service that if grown respected in the music industry – could ultimately harmonize categorization across a multitude of sites like allmusic, discogs, amazon, etc.. ) We could finally see the musical diversity under each artist or identify songs that bridge multiple genres through split votes. You could even represent how “fuzzy” a categorization was by showing if unanimous consensus existed or not, or how strong the association to one genera was compared to another. A guy can dream right?
13.
Quag | August 5, 2008 at 3:24 am
If you think about it, defining a genre for each different “type” of music is not logical. Each song we hear sounds different from the other. If we wanted to define a perfectly categorized music genre tree, we would have to come up with thousands of variations of each known genre, for example electronic music. Most music these days are either electronically produced or sampled then processed by electronic means, yet we put them in different genres i.e trance, house, hard style even hip-hop etc.
If i had to ask someone of my friends, “do you like electronic music” they would say no, i listen to hip-hop. It becomes confusing when there are so many different genres and no defining sound (lets face it, its all about what it sounds like in comparison) that links to a genre, or at least one that people are aware of.
Perhaps if, or when a standard is reached, there can be radio stations or television channels, newspaper coverage on the happenings and changes in the Music genre list xD
14.
David | August 13, 2008 at 4:04 am
As a DJ/music collector, I like to be able to categorize my music. It makes it easier to find. I’m glad to find out that other people are too working on the matter.
Though the idea of a tree is tempting, I’m leaning more towards a kind of attributes system, keywords associated to a song (much like the music genome project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project, or like the “tags” found on last.fm). I generally find last.fm tags to generic while the music genome project “genes” are so abundant that it is impractical to catalogue a personal db by a single person.
One way to define a list of genres would be to define a genre by a set of common keywords from an existing database. For example, if a song has keyword X, Y, A and B then it is a reggae song. Perhaps that would be to complex a system, or it might be too difficult to agree on a common set of keywords… Pandora.com has such a database but I don’t think that it’s content is publicly accessible…
15.
wade | March 27, 2009 at 12:25 am
After contemplating this same puzzle/problem, beening tasked with classifying a music library that has nearly a terabyte of music, into genre. I have decided that keep it simple principle is best.
Windows media player only allows you to classify genre on an Artists Album level, which I find works for 90% of all music.
I’m not sure if it makes sense to try to standardize the world on a particular list of genre, because music is art, and every individual classifies music in different ways, but from an individual high level we can classify our music collections into basic genre.
You can take the basic approach of:
Rock,
Rap,
Country,
Hip-Hop,
Pop,
Dance,
Electronica,
New Age,
Easy Listening,
Oldies,
Holiday,
Alternative,
Disco,
Jazz,
Classical
R&B,
Blues,
Punk,
Other
There are many, many more classifications, and sub classifications, and as your Other folder grows, you can group music into these additional classifications.
Good Luck, this is not an easy task.
16.
Julio | July 28, 2009 at 1:19 am
Hi. I find your post interesting. I agree with both the wikipedia statement and your ideas. However, I dont think checking the most ‘popular’ music trees will do because those will most likely only be correct on ‘popular’ music, which if unlucky, may only include hip-hop and pop etc.
You need to look at more trees that delves into all the genres such as jazz, house, dnb, country etc etc.
17.
Julio | July 28, 2009 at 1:20 am
oh and to wade:
‘Electronica’ does not exist, thats a term Madonna made up for some stupid reason and the media just jumped on the bandwagon, lol.