Radio & Popular Music - Week 4 Response

This week, we tried to ascertain the meaning of genre. We established that genre could be analysed through its codes, conventions, contexts, and common narratives, and that music industries construct genres in order to dictate their production, marketing and consumption. Wall’s text ‘Genre’ fittingly tries to make sense of the concept by using a range of surrounding theories. I chose the complimentary study by Sturm ‘Classification accuracy is not enough’, which evaluates the efficacy of Music Genre Recognition (MGR) systems that are used to automatically tag songs to a certain genre. The study deliberates the subjectivity of genre, and thus concludes the accuracy of such MGR systems is insignificant.

Wall argues that genre is far more complex than we think; he defines it in basic terms how ‘music is classified- or codified’ and therefore how it is ‘produced, distributed and consumed’. (Wall 2003: 180). Wall refers to theorists such as Moore, Frith and Fabbri to outline the multiple debates around genre.

Wall particularly agrees with Frith’s approach- genre is difficult to define, but can be thought of as a process. A multitude of cultural factors aside from form and style all have an influence on the formation of genre. Musicians, consumers and the media also play a key role in understanding new sounds, and marketing them accordingly to form ‘genre cultures’.

Running parallels with Frith and Wall, Sturm argues the complexity of genre and how it is an ambiguous concept, claiming genre to be ‘in large part a subjective construction’ (Sturm 2013: 372). Therefore MGR systems defeat their purpose- they are meant to recognise genres, not just to identify them by ‘irrelevant confounding factors’ (Sturm 2013: 371).

Wall also considers how most theorists build upon Fabbri’s slant on genre. Fabbri created a ‘rules’ system for genre analysis. These rules can be:

• Formal and technical

• Semiotic

• Behavioural

• Social and ideological

• Commercial and juridical.

These decide how a genre is interpreted and coded.

I agree with Wall’s approach that genre is a social construct: it cannot be defined, as genre differs among each individual. I think if genres were demarcated mathematically (in a MRG system, linking to Sturm’s study), they would lose the culture and sincerity attached to them.

I would be intrigued to research which of Fabbri’s rules are most prominent when defining a genre. For example, when faced with punk music, do people think of spiky hair (behavioural) before they think about the rebellious message (ideological)? This could be investigated through an ethnographic study in which participants react and are questioned upon listening to a particular genre of music.

Bibliography

Wall, T, (2003). 'Genre'. In: (ed), Studying Popular Music Culture. 1st ed. UK: Hodder & Stoughton Educational. pp.(179-188).

Sturm, B.L. (2013) ‘Classification accuracy is not enough’. In: Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, 41(3), pp. (371–406).