Aucouturier Jean-Julien and Pachet François , Representing
Musical Genre: A State of the Art, Journal of New Music Research, Vol.
32, No. 1, pp. 83–93, 2003
Abstract
Musical genre is probably the most popular music descriptor. In the
context of large musical databases and Electronic Music Distribution,
genre is therefore a crucial metadata for the description of music
content. However, genre is intrinsically ill-defined and attempts at
defining genre precisely have a strong tendency to end up in circular,
ungrounded projections of fantasies. Is genre an intrinsic attribute of
music
titles, as, say, tempo? Or is genre a extrinsic description of the
whole piece? In this article, we discuss the various approaches in
representing musical genre, and propose to classify these approaches in
three main categories: manual, prescriptive and emergent approaches. We
discuss the pros and cons of each approach, and illustrate our study
with results of the Cuidado IST project.