ACL
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/09 07:36
Okay - I see Joshua's still in here, still punching away... so I guess I have to jump in here again, against all my better instincts. Argh.
Let's say Wendy & I want to write a minimalist-structured piece in 12/8, using string quartet, pedal steel guitar, marimba, lithophone, musique concrete-tape alterered non- rhythmic loops, with a djembe/davul/talking drum rhythm section - and it has lyrics sung by a Fontella Bass sound-alike with vocal backing by a boy's choir.
(Damn - sounds like something we need to get to work on!)
Gee - what genre would you put that under?
Inquiring minds want to know.
kirk & wendy, aka acl
Post edited by: ACL, at: 2008/03/09 07:55
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uncledig
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/09 07:38
ACL wrote:
Gee - what genre would you put that under?
that depends on what it SOUNDS like 
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Joshua Wentz
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/09 08:17
Yeah, I just couldn't stay away... it seems like the point of the discussion has been lost:
if genre assignment = pointless, your point must not be exposure to new listeners. which is fine. if your "artistic integrity" is more important than exposure to new ears, accept the trade off you've made.
but stop trying to convince yourself that more than .001% of the population cares about this issue. they just want to hear something that sounds like <insert iTunes genre search here>.
The issue is NOT egotism or a convoluted sense of integrity or superiority from artists, but rather a desire for music to not be shunted into ill-fitting clothes.
Exposure to new listeners is dependent on genre assignment? Sure, if you're interested in the old major label format. No music in this household has ever been purchased because it is, say "trance", but because it is "good music". New listeners come from marketing, sure, but marketing and "genre assignment" are not synonymous.
The fact that someone would even suggest that it's important to align your music to a genre in order to sell it proves how completely useless the system is, and is rather disheartening to musicians who aspire to do something different. It's not a news flash that "the masses" like generic goods. Whether you're talking about music, books, television, cell phones, or macaroni and cheese, this is the case.
I expect people from Pitchfork Media to tell me how important it is that I fit into their criteria... it's not something I expected from RPMers.
So, we cater to this system? Count me out of that. I'll continue to enjoy all of your music on its merits, not what column it is in the dropdown.
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IronAngel Forge
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/09 08:34
ACL... I think I would call that "uneasy listening". I want that catagory at my local music store!
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cartoonharmony
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/09 08:51
I agree that most of the time genre is pointless. But I don't think it always is. Earlier you compared genre to race. Pointing out racial differences is usually meaningless and ideally we could do away with it. Race comes to describe mostly trivial things about people, just like I think a lot of genre distinctions describe trivial aspects of music. But because race in practice has a demonstrable social impact, it's often something we have to study. Similarly, subcultures form around musical genres and often music either addresses a subculture or makes reference to things that are commonly known in the subculture but not outside of it.
Now all music requires some cultural knowledge to understand, and I think we describe music that doesn't require anything too uncommon as pop. What "everyone knows" changes over time; musicians themselves go and change it! REM was associated with underground/alternative scenes in the 80s, and they significantly changed the pop-culture landscape. Their early music to my ears sounds pretty mainstream, because by the time I was culturally literate they had made those sounds mainstream. Some music requires some subcultural knowledge to grasp well; which aspects of cultural knowledge are subcultural is really up for debate, and obviously depend on time and place. It's sometimes hard to pin down.
I think if you're not trying to address a specific subculture you might call your music free of genre. I sort of feel this way about my music (outside of saying that it's definitely not academic and therefore pop). But I also have to acknowledge that there are probably places in the world where my album would sound weird. Maybe they'd think it was addressing only Americans, which would be a pretty fair assessment. There are people alive today whose parents played them Schoenberg instead of Mozart, and who thus hear the pitch relationships that organize atonal and serial music more naturally than the harmonies of tonal music. They might classify my album first and foremost as "TONAL TRASH"! I really feel the futility of the whole idea. It's exactly like race, thinking of the film Hotel Rwanda where the physical difference between the races is indistinguishable to people from the outside. Or how some groups once considered racially separate in America now are grouped together. Who calls the Who "mods" anymore, or identifies REM with an underground/alternative culture? But genre classifications still wind up changing the way that music is made and listened to. The are real and, yes, often problematic.
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cartoonharmony
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/09 08:51
oops, double-posted... I swear I didn't hit submit twice, don't know what happened...
Post edited by: cartoonharmony, at: 2008/03/09 08:55
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Joshua Wentz
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/09 08:57
But genre classifications still wind up changing the way that music is made and listened to. The are real and, yes, often problematic.
I completely agree. I simply find it unfortunate. I dislike problematic things, you see
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cartoonharmony
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/09 09:02
OK, cool. Well anyhow, I really look forward to hearing your music, however it sounds, on Tuesday; your images, words, general confidence about the project indicate that you probably "know what you're doing", and you don't have any demos up so I'm in suspense. I like suspense. And problematic things.
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mick
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/09 09:04
ACL wrote:
Let's say Wendy & I want to write a minimalist-structured piece in 12/8, using string quartet, pedal steel guitar, marimba, lithophone, musique concrete-tape alterered non- rhythmic loops, with a djembe/davul/talking drum rhythm section - and it has lyrics sung by a Fontella Bass sound-alike with vocal backing by a boy's choir.
I don't know but I'll be happy to do the djembe/duval/talking drum part
Post edited by: mick, at: 2008/03/09 19:05
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Mosfet
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/09 17:08
OK.. I motion we officially close this thread! I will support such notion with the recommendation that we add one of two things to the Jukebox that isn't already being discussed:
1. the aforementioned 'genre-agnostic' category (or whatever name you guys pick) to the genre classification which allows folks who wish to be so non-classified - to be classified "in the system" but not in anyone's musical perception
2. we roll out a random playlist generator which draws upon the vast arsenal of tracks across the 3 year library -which will be about 15,000+ songs (shit!) when 2008 is done... and we will refer to this function as the Wentzinator! Anyone who knows anything about data, knows it's actually very hard to generate random lists... hence, I don't know why it's hard to do so, but I hear it's very difficult. So barring imperfect randomness... we should be able to do this.
Combine this with playlist sharing and of course your own customization of said random lists..
Our focus can (as Josh refreshingly brought back up) shift back to listening to each other's music without question of method of access.
phew... OK.. wedding invites going to kinkos... They're looking good!
ONE HUGE THING - I figured out that if you use The GIMP's default file format - XCF - you can retain editable Text Layers.. I was always saving as PSD - and The GIMP would always Flatten Text! So it made all my RPM 06 and 07 album artwork creation VERY tough.. always have to have a notepad file with text in it to whip up text layers when needed!
BAAA!
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cartoonharmony
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/09 19:54
Mosfet wrote:
Anyone who knows anything about data, knows it's actually very hard to generate random lists... hence, I don't know why it's hard to do so, but I hear it's very difficult. So barring imperfect randomness... we should be able to do this.
It's really easy to come up with a sequence of track numbers to play that has very little connection to their original ordering (EDIT: it's fundamentally impossible to generate random numbers on computers with deterministic instruction sets, but this can be overcome by using input that's not correlated to the problem domain. The requirements for randomness in mathematical terms are stricter when generating random numbers for cryptography, and it is actually hard to generate numbers uncorrelated enough with eachother for that field.). Unfortunately the human brain loves to find patterns in randomness.
If you've studied probability you know that in a group of 20 people it's more likely than not that at least two share a birthday. By the same calculation, if you have 365 albums with the same number of songs per album in a big playlist, it's more likely than not that some album will have at least two of its songs played within the first 20 tracks played. Because the human brain loves to find patterns, it perceives the ordering as biased somehow, even though it's probably not.
The one bias I can think of using the most simple random system (rand() % n) is that numbers less than UINT_MAX % n (where n is your playlist size, UINT_MAX is the largest random number the system can generate) are slightly more likely to occur. This is only really significant for extremely large playlists. If you're getting 32-bit random numbers you'd need hundreds of millions of songs before I'd start being concerned about this; I only really thought about this because if you were getting 16-bit random numbers having tens of thousands of tracks would be concerning. But you're definitely getting at least 32-bit numbers on any remotely modern computer, so that's not a worry. It could be easily corrected anyway by disposing of all rand() calls that return results greater than UINT_MAX - (UINT_MAX % n).
I haven't looked a lot into this problem as it pertains to playlists; some playlist generators disqualify tracks that have already played, and I'm sure some are weighted against playing stuff from albums that have played recently. All to correct for the brain's love of pattern detection.
Post edited by: cartoonharmony, at: 2008/03/09 19:57
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ACL
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/09 20:01
Yes. I'll Second Mosfet's Motion.
I'll leave this discussion through way of Wendy's infinite wisdom.
Usually when you see us online here at RPM - well, that's Wendy. She's going through the profile pages to see who's entered; and when she finds profiles with music on them, she listens to the music there. Many of you have received PM's from Wendy - because when she finds something she likes, she lets you know that she liked your music. She thinks that's the right thing to do.
She listens to everything, regardless of genre - even though there are things she tends to shy away from - because she never knows when she's going to come across something incredible that she would've missed if she paid attention to the label attached to it.
And that's why she loves RPM - there are gems hidden here. It's just up to you to find them.
I guess I was just trying to find a way to free all of us from the artificial subjective filters - either the ones forced upon us, or the ones we force upon ourselves - because most of the time, all they do is get in the way of having a new experience; they get in the way of broadening our characters, and making us better human beings.
It's all about being open to experience what's good about Life - and Music falls into that category.
SO Enough already. Dustin, I have no problem with a "genre-agnostic" category. That sounds workable.
As for the subject of genre outside RPM - which is what this topic was originally about(argh) - well, we'll just leave that dangling.
And Mick - I'll have my people call your people about setting up that djembe/davul/talking drum track... as soon as I can find Fontella Bass.
ACL wrote:
Discuss.
Vigorously.
Geez... that's the LAST time I ever say THAT in a thread.
Oy.
kirk & wendy, aka acl
Post edited by: ACL, at: 2008/03/09 20:03
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timnelson
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/09 20:37
This thread reminds me of the time the guest on 'What's My Line' was Salvador Dali...
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=iXT2E9Ccc8A
I can never come up with a non-awkward answer to the old genre question. I know this is asking for trouble, but can any of you creative types tell me what's MY genre? (About three quarters of my CD is on my RPM page...)
-t-
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Joshua Wentz
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/09 21:33
Yes, please remember, Mosfet, that this thread may have been spawned by forced genres in the Jukebox, but it was not really about that at all. I see nothing wrong with musicians having a discussion about music, even if the subject is comleteley amorphous.
Of course no one will have an answer, that's why we discuss.
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Mosfet
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/09 22:59
Well I'm a classic non-confrontation-oriented-passive-aggressive.. so the less I get involved in discussions the more likely for me not to churn it all up I guess too.
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tangmo
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/10 00:12
just apply the suffix -esque to your favorite bandname. Voila! Instant genreificationism.
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cartoonharmony
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/10 00:20
tangmo wrote:
just apply the suffix -esque to your favorite bandname. Voila! Instant genreificationism.
Yeah, that's what I do if when I say I'm doing a pop album they say, "So, like, top-40?" *facepalm* How is "Top-40" a description of music at all!?! My description goes, "Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan and John Darnielle get in a car accident, suffer severe injuries to their talent, and start a band together."
I realize, however, that this wouldn't work for a lot of people that are more stylistically adventurous than me.
Post edited by: cartoonharmony, at: 2008/03/10 00:21
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Kemmler
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/10 00:46
Here's an idea for genre classification that may or may not work.
Not practical, but see what you think:
Lay out all genres in a tree format. Then, you can traverse down the tree and say "is my music popular or academic?" (or similar binary category)... then, further down, "is it rock or classical" (not a good example but you see what I'm getting at)... eventually you'll reach a decision that can't be made definitively, so you stop there.
If your music really is too broad you might just define it oppositionally. It's "not rock".
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tangmo
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/10 03:33
Q: Is it Top 40?
A: It ought to be.
You've certainly made me want to hear yours in 25 words or less.
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Joshua Wentz
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/10 04:14
Kemmler, you just gave me a REALLY GOOD idea.
Cartoonharmony, you just gave me a hilariously morbid mental picture. I'm reminded of a bit by comedian Todd Barry, where he's talking to a band manager/promoter. Something to the effect of this:
Todd: So what's your band sound like?
Promoter: They're like if you combined Weezer, and Greenday, only a more indie feel.
Todd: Oh, so they sound like Weezer, then.
Tangmo, that's a fantastic response.
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Mosfet
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/10 04:19
cartoonharmony wrote:
I haven't looked a lot into this problem as it pertains to playlists; some playlist generators disqualify tracks that have already played, and I'm sure some are weighted against playing stuff from albums that have played recently. All to correct for the brain's love of pattern detection.<br><br>Post edited by: cartoonharmony, at: 2008/03/09 19:57
Well if you're interested in helping us with the logic and code for MySQL querys... send me a PM!
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bkoz
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/10 05:09
OMG this has got to be the most replied to thread since the challenge ended! I personally do not care what genre is up there for me to choose from simply because I'm really not even sure what 'genre' my music is in. We put in Folk because it comes closer to that than it does 'country' though we have some sorta country songs. It's like the colors of the rainbow, ROYGBIV, basically seven colors but millions of shades. Music is like that, basically seven notes to work with, ABCDEFG, but millions of different rhythms and melodies. The 'genre', though basic should give one an idea of what direction your music lies. If I put down Folk then your probably not going to expect electro funk songs or if you see Metal as the genre you probably won't hear a country song.
Remember the more defined and specific the 'genre' name the less the average joe will know what your music is about.
Oz
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Kemmler
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/10 07:53
Bkoz wrote:
Remember the more defined and specific the 'genre' name the less the average joe will know what your music is about.
Oz
Yeah, this is really true. Although my album includes everything from DnB to disco house to dark ambient, I usually just describe it as "techno" (technically this label is wildly incorrect) to regular laypeople because electronic sub-genres mean absolutely nothing to most people.
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Mosfet
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/11 20:34
Joshua Wentz wrote:
Ultimately, you're right. I should have told them to dis-include me from the jukebox. I wish I'd thought of that last night.
Solves my problem, but doesn't speak much to the nature of music. If we are to move beyond this situation, wouldn't it be nice to start in a project like RPM, something that's overtly asking musicians to do something different, stretch their creative muscles, and so on?
Pandora's system of "cohorts" does work fairly well, in the "if you like this you may like this" method of focus. More often than not, I like what comes up on that. It still relies on the majority rule without locking into a single genre.
The genre selection issue - wasn't actually for the jukebox... trust me.. that' s my ball of wax... I'll happily give you a null genre there..
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Joshua Wentz
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/11 21:41
Good to know, and thanks.
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Eschertron
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/03/13 09:34
Kemmler wrote:
Here's an idea for genre classification that may or may not work.
Not practical, but see what you think:
Lay out all genres in a tree format. Then, you can traverse down the tree and say "is my music popular or academic?" (or similar binary category)... then, further down, "is it rock or classical" (not a good example but you see what I'm getting at)... eventually you'll reach a decision that can't be made definitively, so you stop there.
If your music really is too broad you might just define it oppositionally. It's "not rock".
The dichotomous tree works really well when the classifications all lie in the same plane: eg, my music could be more 'rock' than 'jazz', so I can make the choice. However, in the current situation, we are faced with choices that are not related at all like that; for instance I can't decide if my music is more 'rock' than 'instrumental', because there's absolutely no relationship between those two categories. When we begin with a classification scheme that makes sense, we'll be able to use logic to describe our music. (sighs) ... won't that be nice...
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room34
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/04/09 03:18
So I just finally went and checked myself out in the jukebox, and my music is classified as "Alternative & Punk." WTF? First of all, I've always hated that genre when it comes up on iTunes/CDDB. How the hell do those even go together? And it seems like it's just the catch-all category for lazy classifiers who can't figure out what music really is. (The fact that Captain Beefheart shows up in that genre says enough for me, but I suppose I should be happy to be in that company.)
Anyway... I'm pretty sure I never classified my music that way, and I wouldn't. So why can't I CHANGE it??? I can edit the titles; I don't get why the genre isn't also editable.
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Joshua Wentz
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/05/01 14:50
The more I thought about this conversation, spawned by ACL and contributed to by musicians whose work I really respect, the more a few things really got to me. The idea of conforming to a system that doesn't work on every level just for the sake of "sales" seemed ridiculous, the true definition of being a sellout. It's my personal belief, though obviously not a universal one.
So, I set up a website about it... well, not just about genre, but about ideas and ideals in music: degenre
The site is two-fold. One one hand, I've decided to "review" every single album that I own. It's a way to reconnect with the music that I have, and I think it'll be nice, in a decade's time, to have a catalog of all of these albums.
On the other hand, the site is dedicated to writings on ideas and ideals in music. This part of the site is open to anyone who has something to say—if you write up a short (or long) essay and send it to me, I may put it up on the site. And no, these writings don't have to agree with what I say. I actually enjoy hearing the viewpoints of others.
Anyhow, this project will grow over the next several months... the "dichotomous tree" concept will come into play sometime in the summer, and I think it will be quite interesting/humorous.
That's it.
Post edited by: Joshua Wentz, at: 2008/05/01 14:55
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mick
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/05/01 15:48
I have an song for you, Joshua.
"Tipping at Windmills" by Don Quioxte
 
Seriously though. I like the idea. You plan on being the reviewer guy? Will I be able to search a mood quickly?
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ACL
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Re:A possible solution to Genre. Or not. - 2008/05/01 15:50
Excellent idea, excellent site, & excellent 1st essay...
We'll be there... and Kirk has already started working up a long-form essay for it on the topic:
Genre - aka, the Fear Of Music.
See ya there.
kirk & wendy, aka acl, aka another cultural landslide
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