music genres classification essay

Different Types of Music Definition Essay

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Music has been, and remains to be, unbeatable nourishment for the soul. In spite of the fact that there are many different types of music, they all serve, virtually, the same purpose of entertaining people and lifting people’s spirits. With this, it is clear that music is inseparable from the lives of human beings since without music, people will have a hard time finding a way to relax and be entertained. This paper is an exploration of the different types of music played world over.

One of the commonest types of music is Gospel music. It is a type of music where songs are written and played with the objective of praising or honoring God. It is mainly popular among the Christian community and it has attracted a lot of fans all over the world.

Gospel music takes a lot of forms depending on the artists and their faith but some classifications cut across all denominations (McManus 58). Some of these classifications include songs for praise and worship, rap gospel, rock gospel and the like. Virtually every community has a number of gospel songs that they sing in church as they worship their God.

There are however gospel songs and artists who have gained worldwide popularity. Most of these songs and artists are from the United States. Some of the artists who are known for their contribution in Gospel music include Women of Faith, Kirk Franklin, Cece Winans etc.

Another type of music is rap music. This type of music is made up of powerful beats and rhyming and fast spoken words that come out rhythmically. It is most popular among Afro-Americans although it has gained worldwide popularity. Rap music is associated with criminals and ex-convicts and thus many rap artists claim to have been in jail at one point in their lives.

Rhythm and blues is a type of music with slow beats and rhythmic keyboard or guitar accompaniment. It is mainly used to convey love messages. Rhythm and blues originated from the United States but it now has an artist and fan base all over the world (Ajanta 1). Rhythm and blues is, arguably, the commonest type of music given its appropriateness for a myriad of environments.

Almost all the aforementioned types of music originated from a type of music called folk music. Contemporary music, therefore, is a combination of a number of folklore musical arts. Folk music is mainly used in preservation of cultural values and thus its features are mainly words that preserve certain events and dressings and dance styles for a particular ethnic community.

Due to the culture preservation nature of folk music, it has been used by nations in public functions (“Types of Music” 1). It has also been used by a number of countries as a means of attracting tourists.

There are many types of music such that an exhaustive analysis of all types of music is, somehow, impractical. Early artists came up with the types of music depending on the passions they had as far as music is concerned. The types that were developed then continue to evolve and many contemporary music types have been developed. Despite the variety of the types of music, all types of music are equally important since they perform very critical roles in the societies where they are popular.

Works Cited

Ajanta, Bhatta. “Different Types of Music”. 2009. Web.

McManus, Henry. Music Classifications . Journal of Arts, 2009, pp. 32- 154.

Music. “Types of Music”. 2010. Web.

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Classification of music genres

Music is classified based on the scales and instruments used in a composition. Rock music has been popular for generations and has many sub-genres like grunge, metal, and psychedelic rock. Grunge music started as an underground movement in the late 80s and early 90s, but Nirvana’s breakthrough single ‘Smells like teen spirit’ made it mainstream. Metal became popular in the 70s with bands like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, while psychedelic rock started with Pink Floyd. The genres experiment with instruments and have their own unique sound, with preferences in lyrics varying from fantasy to political issues to apathy. Rock music has pushed out pop music for a while and remains a significant force in the music industry.

Music and its classification are variedly based on the scales and instruments employed in the composition of a piece. With most instruments (such as guitar) being more and more regularly used in almost all genres, it has become ever more difficult to assign a musical piece to a single strict category. Rock music however has been a staple of many generations during the 20th century and its sub genres have now become significant enough to stand on their own. This being a classification essay, we will concentrate on three such genres mainly grunge, metal and psychedelic rock.

Grunge music initially started as an underground movement in the late 80’s and arly 90’s. Nirvana’s breakthrough single ‘Smells like teen spirit’ however broke all norms and propelled the genre to mainstream. Groups such as Soundgarden, Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam emerged as the main players and representatives of the youth of that generation. To this day, Pearl Jam is the only group that still survives from the major four of the grunge movement and after much experimentation has returned to its grunge roots. The genre mainly makes use of guitars with heavy, dirge like riffs supported by an equally strong drumbeat and angst filled vocals.

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Metal and its variants became popular in the 70’s when bands such as Black Sabbath and Judas Priest hit the mainstream. After a brief slump, bands like Iron Maiden and Metallica revived the metal scene and a plethora of bands followed suit. Slayer, Metallica, Anathema etc. were flag bearers of the movement that started with the British Metal movement and continued all over the world. The genre comprises of a strong bass line, fast and aggressive drumbeats along with heavy use of the electric guitar. Vocals are usually aggressive but at times indecipherable especially in subgenres like grind core, death metal etc.

Psychedelic rock, some say, started off with Pink Floyd taking the main stage as the leading band of the 70’s. Roger Waters and David Gilmore inspired a generation of rock artists and musicians the world over but their roots can be traced back to bluegrass artists such as the Living Dead and super groups like Led Zeppelin. The tone is depressive and the music is set to put audiences in a trance like mode, hence the name. The genre extensively comprises of soothing drumbeats, soft bass lines and self indulgent yet emotional solos using the electric guitar.

Musicians in almost all of the above genres experiment a lot with instruments such as the electric piano (Children of Bodom), saxophone (Pink Floyd), harmonica (Pearl Jam). In the end however, it’s the regular guitar arranged for some other instrument or with a unique sound along with a bass guitar and drum kit which is the staple set of instruments for all. Preferences in lyrics vary from fantasy (Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath) to political issues (Pearl Jam), death and its variations (Slayer, Metallica) to apathy (Pink Floyd,

Nirvana) and there are many crossovers in between as well.

In the end, these are the genres that pushed out pop music for a little while (Nirvana forcing Michael Jackson to second place on the Billboard charts) and helped produce the sound with which generations have identified themselves with (form the 1970’s till the 2000’s). even though sub genres come and go, rock will forever remain a force to reckon with in the music industry.

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How to Write a Classification Essay: Complete Guide and Popular Topics

Updated 13 Jun 2024

Before delving deep into this theme, it is important to examine these words separately from each other and get a definitive picture of what an essay is, then we would be able to get the importance behind a good classification essay. A paper can be defined as a short piece of written material on any topic or subject; however, in today’s context, the length is no more than the major determinant. Based on what is needed, you can create a short essays or not. Different subjects require another word counts for papers.

What is a Classification Essay? A Brief Overview

Classification is described as the art of arranging together a number of objects that share similar characteristics or source. A classification paper, therefore, deals with the arrangement of several topics or themes in an paper setting, all of them sharing common properties.

This type of writing isn’t popular by demand; most people prefer to go for essay types that they are accustomed to. Students are generally more accustomed to writing reflective, narrative, imaginative and argumentative papers than a classification-related work. But simply by reading classification essay examples , you will see that this type of writing is not as confusing as it might look.

The basic duty of any classification essay is to help organize thoughts and other things into categories where any suggestions or events that are headed in the same direction are placed in one category. This type of writing is also good for giving educative and informative samples of suitable topics that can be used for this paper type.

Why is it essential to create an excellent classification paper? The foremost reason would be to pass the right message across to people who would read and analyse it. The next reason would be for your own personal benefit. If this essay is a top determinant in the grade you will get for a subject, you would want to put it in your best efforts. Also, you would want to avoid getting pointed out for poor calibre work.

Now we would move into explaining the classification essay outline.

Read also: How to Write a Process Essay : Excellent Guide with 10+ Examples

Designing the Perfect Outline For Your Classification Essay

The classification essay outline has the advantage of staying almost similar even as the idea behind essay changes. Having a good outline is critical to the success of any paper – it serves as an informative guide to you and helps you plan your 500 words essay and paragraphs. 

A brilliant outline is usually made up of three solid sections: introduction, body paragraph, and conclusion. It’s imperative you understand what each section entails; this will help you avoid unnecessary editing at the end of a long writing process.

Introduction  

This where you open the floor for the average reader to grasp a basic concept of what your classification essay is about. Here you provide certain pointers that skim through the whole piece without revealing more than needed. The introductory part is designed to get the reader’s attention, get them interested in wanting to do an analysis through the rest of the text willingly. If you are a college student or in your finishing years putting together results of a long-time research project, chances are that your teachers or course co-ordinators will be your audience.

What can be included in an classification writing introduction? For a start, a definition or two would be ideal to set the atmosphere for the rest of the write-up. Some prefer to include their definitions in the first paragraph of the body. But you have to remember that this choice depends more on the type of writing and your preference. There is no specific template for penning the perfect essay.

Main Text 

This is where you get your writing juices flowing. One thing most people do not realize is that it’s quite easy to diverge from the central theme; hence it’s important to focus on the relevant information. 

It consists of paragraphs, each structured to give a critical discourse of a fact or your opinion on a subject. In a classification paper, the aim of the text would be, without doubt, to lay out various categories related to the theme of discussion, and probably explain why some objects are a better fit for one division or the other. Your text should be able to explain fully all points that may have been raised. 

If you compare systems that classify things, for example, you might want to highlight differences between previous and modern systems and add some words on the influence both systems had on whatever they were used to classify.

Conclusion 

A classification essay conclusion must be as concise as the introduction. Apart from wrapping up the whole text, the purpose of a conclusion is to identify any new lessons that may have been learnt in classifying things. A concluding paragraph is no place for a fresh set of ideas and arguments; the paper is supposed to end there - and end there.

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How to Write a Classification Essay: Detailed Plan

Having considered parts in this type of write-up, we will now talk on how to write a classification essay. Let’s look at it from three sides.

Choosing a topic for a classification writing

When you are choosing a theme, there are a few things you can do. One of them is to find out what you personally like. It’s easier for people to organize concepts centered around what interests them than writing on themes they have no interest or connection to.

Another thing you can do is choose from themes that are known to have quality coverage, i.e., you can always find secondary data related to whatever you need to classify. This becomes a big help if you are a high school student asked to do such academic writing.

Subjects to write on

It is essential to choose a subject matter that can be of social relevance, something that is relatable for everyone. It will also help if the subject you choose to write on contains new information that contributes to improving professional knowledge. This is especially good when you are writing about methods that classify words related to complex and volatile study fields like Medicine, Law, Engineering, and so on.

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Building up the main body of the text: things to remember

• Try not to jump around an idea. This applies to all papers you will ever create. Always go straight to the main idea you are trying to elaborate on. Be sure you do your maximum best to describe different points, and always explain your stand when any part of the write-up requires your input.
• Clearly, indicate where your paragraphs begin and end your classification paper. Do not put your words in an endless stream. It would confuse people, even those who have gone far in school study.
• Check your grammar and punctuation. This should be as clear as day.
• Keep to the number of words. If instructions specify a certain amount of characters (letters, numbers et al.) be cautious to observe the count. Precision is always rewarded.
• Do not use words that question your confidence regarding classifications, namely ‘maybe, probably,’ ‘I guess,’ etc. They are a big turn-off.

Read also: Useful Tips On How To Write A Short Essay

Classification Essay Topics

There are a number of topics one can choose from. We would examine some of the best from three categories.

Classification Essay Topics about Music

• All About Genres: Types and Origins
• Exploring Types of Rock Music
• The Music Eras: Categories and Durations
• A Cross-Section on Different Types of Rap Music
• A Comparison Between Subdivisions of Slow-Paced Music
• An Assessment of Different Subdivisions of Fast-Paced Music
• Understanding Harmony: Classifying Parts
• Classifications of Music Based on Dynamics and Tone
• Different Styles of Music: From Classics to Jazz
• Identifying Generations of Music Composers

Topics of Classification Paper about Movies

• An Expose on Movie Genres in the 21st Century.
• An Overview of Work Behind Scenes – Different Stages of Film Production.
• Understanding the Evolution of Screen Cameras Over the Years.
• An Introduction to the Concept of Copyright: Types and Uses.
• Anime vs. Animated Movies: Understanding Types of Graphics Used for Screen Effects.
• Roles of Different Members of the Production Crew in Final Touches of a Film.
• In the Book and on the Screen: Why Some Book Storylines are Altered for the Big Screen.
• Classification of Roles in a Film – and why the Lead Actor isn’t Always Acting the Hard Part.
• Getting Ideas: Different Ways of Producing on a Movie Set.
• Categories of Film Tricks Used in Movies.

Classification Essay Topics on Sports

• Types of Ball Games in Different Countries.
• Subdivisions of the Olympic Games.
• Understanding Volleyball: Types of Serves.
• The Origin of Different Swimming Styles.
• Working by Lines – Categories of Referees.
• A Day In the Duration of Various Types of Track Events.
• Between Shotput and Javelin: An Example of Unequal Strengths.
• Rules of the Tennis Court: Serving Styles and Origins.
• Between Karate and Boxing: Other Related but Unknown Sporting Practices.
• Types of Services That Function During a Sports Event.

Summarize What is Written in Your Classification Paper

Like every other paper, classification writing can pose difficulties especially for students who do not often get enough time to focus, find information and compile needed data. But this can be taken care of thanks to Edubirdie, a respectable writing service that has been in the business for a long time and we know who can pay someone to write my paper . Our team of scholarship essay writing service experts handle a large selection of process, definition, scholarship papers and are competent enough to help you out with a classification essay as well. Should you ever need help, give us a buzz.

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Importance of music in my life – Classification and Division essay

Introduction

Here I classify music and its importance in my life. In my essay, I break down music into some of its most popular genres and then explain their importance in my life.

Classification

Music is the use of vocal sounds or instrumental sounds, or both. It is used to form a harmony or expression that is often easier to memorize than just a selection of notes or words.

Music may be divided in to genres, which are forms of music that tend to follow similar rules or patterns.

Here vocals are more often used over instrumental music, with the defining feature being the poetic use of words to a beat. This form of music has had a profound effect on my life as it has allowed me to express feelings and emotions I didn’t know I had. For example, the song, “No love” that features Eminem helped me express a form of gut determination I didn’t know I had.

This is often told as a story, with many of the US versions being centered on stories of hardship and sadness. The instrumentals also tend to be acoustic, and several forms include more than one singer or story. This type of music has had an effect on my life through allowing me to express sad emotions through the stories of others. For example, the “Whisky lullaby” demonstrates the sadness a person may feel at being unable to stop the loss of a loved one.

This form of music often involves a heavy drum feature and electric guitars. It is an angry form of music that is meant to elicit emotions beyond happiness or sadness, bringing about feelings either of aggression, anger or excitement. This has had an effect on my life through allowing me to express anger vicariously instead of on other people. Masters of such techniques involve groups such as Aerosmith and Blink 182, although the latter is more about expressing excitement.

Opera and gothic Opera

This is a form of music that relies heavily on vocals, with there often being just one vocalist, though the rest of the band may join in during certain parts of the song. They often involve big instrumental pieces, sometimes with the singer singing over them, and often involve a full orchestra. The best on the planet for this type of music is a group called Nightwish, and they have had an impact on my life through allowing me to express repressed emotions through the power their music holds on both a conscious and unconscious level.

The effect of music can be quite profound, with psychologists proving that a music can evoke emotions, can bring back memories, and can allow people to live vicariously and thereby not have to express their emotions in a more real and/or negative way. My essay did not cover all forms of music, but did cover the major genres that have affected my life in some way, and that still affect the lives of thousands of people worldwide irrespective of their race, background or general attitude.

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Classification of Music: Essay Sample

Introduction

Music is considered to be part of every culture whether small or big. Music has become part of people as through music people can express their feelings and as well as it music represents people. Music is an art that keeps on growing from one generation to another enhancing the growth of new ideas as well as feelings that capture the listeners. Music can be classified into different genres. The main genres of music include jazz, rock, country, hip-hop, and blues.

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The blues is a music genre which is a combination of the Western and the African music. During the 18th and the 19th century when the Africans were being transported to America as slaves, they went with their rhythms and melodies. They understood that singing together helped make their work easier and hence they preserved these work songs until the end of slavery. Whenever the African Americans sang the old work songs could be heard in the American rhythms. Some of the blues songs tend to tell stories of pain and heartbreak, and such songs are usually played using a slow and sad tone. The blues are usually about love or even having fun. Some of the well-known people for the recording of blues include Muddy Waters, Billie Holiday, Mc Tell and Bukka White.

The other classification of music genre is rock. Rock is a genre which involves popular music and was developed in the United States and the United Kingdom after the 1960s.This genre started in the 1940s with the start of rock and roll. The rock music is closely related to other music genres such as folk and blues. The electric guitar is mostly used when playing this type of music as part of a rock group with drums and bass guitar. The rock music has a verse-chorus form and 4/4 beat. The main focus of this genre is on live performance and musical skill. One of the first bands to record the rock music was "Bill Hayley and His Comets."

The jazz music is a classification of music which is a combination of the European and African-American music. Jazz music started to become popular in the 1910s.Some of the common instruments that are used in this type of music genre include the double bass, trumpet, saxophone, piano, and drums. One of the greatest musicians in this type of music genre is Louis Armstrong who helped in developing of different styles of jazz.

Country music genre has its beginnings and roots in folk music. The modern-day country music started after World War II. Country music was one of the first music genres of modern American popular music, while the old-time music is considered as being the earliest country music style. Some of the musical instruments that were used in this type of music include Hawaiian steel guitar, autoharp, banjo, fiddle and acoustic guitar.

Hip-hop is a music genre that started in the Latino-American urban areas and Jamaican -American in the 1970s.The style of singing used in this type of music is rapping whereby a group of chants or the singer tends to say words rhythmically. Most of the hip-hop song's lyrics tend to communicate more information regarding the life of people in the urban areas. Other hip-hop lyrics are about illegal drugs, violence, and gangs. The common musical styles in this genre are reggae and disco.

In conclusion, music can be classified into different genres. The main genres of music are blues, rock, country and the jazz music. These different music genres are played using different musical instruments and tones. The tone of the music mainly depends on the message that is being communicated.

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David Brackett. 2016. Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-Century Popular Music. Berkeley: University of California Press

• Thomas Johnson

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In Categorizing Sound , David Brackett presents a broad and richly detailed “history of the practice of categorizing” popular music in the twentieth century (331), asking when, how, and why stylistic labels and classification schemes become legible across communities of musicians, fans, journalists, and music industry personnel. This is no simple task, as Brackett can attest, having jousted with the “chimera of genre” for over twenty years (xiii). To grapple with as slippery and cumbersome a topic as popular music categories, the book deftly moves from sharply focused comparative analyses of songs to grand narratives of popular music history in the United States, investigating the ways musical groupings intertwine with their technological, social, and cultural contexts. Brackett’s book is a nuanced and far-reaching addition to recent musicological publications on genre—including works about genre and gender in popular music (Burns 2000), social mediation of genres and identities (Born 2011), genre in twentieth-century art musics (Drott 2013), metal (Smialek 2015), twenty-first century “new music” scenes (Robin 2016), and recent popular music (James 2017a, 2017b).

Brackett accomplishes two main goals through a genealogical approach: he traces a few continuous diachronic threads through categorical changes while simultaneously presenting semi-independent synchronic slices of classificatory assemblages. Through seven in-depth case studies in three chronological periods (the 1920s, 1940s, and 1960s–80s), Brackett navigates the turbulence of popular music’s ever-shifting categorizational wake. Each case study engages an incisive exploration of a large-scale popular music genre or two at a particular historical moment by comparing music industry machinations with journalistic discourses and musical analysis. These explorations tend to problematize traditional narrative histories of genres (especially jazz, blues, and country) by diving into the swirling milieus of their origins and the various temporal sites of their contestations, resulting in a complex and rewarding act of historical revision. The introduction to Categorizing Sound provides a surplus of theoreti-

cal underpinnings for the case studies that follow by way of an extensive meditation on genre qua concept. This chapter will be useful to anyone interested in musical categorization in general, and it should be required reading in any course on popular music. The depths to which Brackett plumbs the many concepts covered in this first chapter perhaps overprepares the reader for the rest of the book since he covers a wide range of theories of categorization that find tangential relevance later on. Most relevant for his case studies is the distinction between critic-fan genres and music-industry categories, which rely on separate strategies for musical grouping (11). Brackett also adopts Born’s (2000) typology of mappings between communities of people and of music, from homological to fantasized relations, which structures much of his later discussions (20). Derridean notions of genre as citation and iteration (12–13) permeate the book as well, and a casual engagement with assemblage theories (10) springs up occasionally. Much of what follows this introduction requires only a loose understanding of the theories and ideas Brackett explores, so the reader need not follow all the connections to film studies, literature, and poststructuralist philosophy to contend with the subsequent case studies.

With this background in place, chapters 2 through 4 survey popular music at the outset of the century, exploring how newfound modes of musical (re)production emerged alongside “changes in immigration laws, demographic shifts, the redrawing of high-low cultural-aesthetic boundaries, and the reorganization of institutions involved with the circulation of music, among other factors” (43). As a way into this tenuous world, Brackett lucidly argues in chapter 2 (“Foreign Music and the Emergence of Phonography”) that the contemporaneous catch-all category of musical otherness, foreign music, laid important groundwork for understanding later industry distinctions between musics by marginalized groups of people. Undergoing significant change from the turn of the century to the 1920s, foreign music was a site of contention for listeners and musicians as recent immigrants latched on to various musics to ground their identities, and industry powers fought to identify the most viable audiences, musicians, and labels for the plethora of musics subsumed under this title. Brackett shows how subcategories of foreign music expressed both homologous and exoticist/imaginary relationships with musical communities and thus exemplifies a common theme of his book: When industry and public discourses link categories of music with categories of people, they tend to conflate stereotypes with actual listening communities. The Hebrew-Yiddish musical category, for instance, was homologous “in that it referred to a preexisting demographic group, which the music industry assumed was its main audience” (57). Brackett explains, however, that it also “spoke to the exotic fantasies of consumers who did not identify with that preexisting demographic” (57), reinforcing stereotypes of Jewishness. Similar tensions and struggles over musical-identity isographies—concerning representation, identity, community, and the sounding of race—became ever more audible and directly embodied in recordings. One positive result of this process was that musical elements like timbre, vocal inflection, groove, and microtimings, which Brackett suggests are “associated with marginal elements of the population” (154), gained aesthetic import. Along with technological advancements (especially with the rise of jukeboxes), the capital imbued into these musical elements helped generate a “sonic aesthetic” in which recordings were recognized as primary texts and as a viable format for measuring popularity. Such a recording ontology opposed an inherited song-as-text work concept that the sheet music and publishing industry pushed well into the 1940s. Brackett argues that the sonic aesthetic, unique to and characteristic of the recording era, stems from foreign music, a structuring pillar of the popular music field for the first 40 years of the twentieth century.

Chapters 3 (“Forward to the Past: Race Music in the 1920s”) and 4 (“The Newness of Old-Time Music”) combat presentist accounts of early blues and country, respectively. A traditional account of early blues, for instance, treats it in relative isolation, attempting to excavate the causal kernels for its assumed later telos in which the virile, male, non-commercial musician is taken as the blues archetype (71). Instead, Brackett enters the historical network of the blues (and subsequently of race music) in situ , reveling in the melee that surrounded the style and its nominal descriptor. As in his other chapters, Brackett’s discussion clarifies how a genre’s legibility “could only be attained via the gradual assembling together of musical sounds, the social connotations of performers and audience, and a shared sense of affect and physical movement that cut across demographic divisions, along with a term or concept that could function as a label” (77). What results  is a complex view of race, gender, and identity that canonical trajectories of blues and jazz frequently gloss over. The following chapter similarly challenges orthodox histories of country, hillbilly, or old-time musics, and Brackett illuminates “the struggle over the naming of this category” (114). “Hillbilly,” for instance, was neither a ubiquitous nor a well-defined term, used mostly as a “quasi-sociological” explanation of the music as “a pathological phenomenon” (125). Brackett’s close analysis of sources shows how the loose constellation of generic labels surrounding “hillbilly” could be understood as simultaneously “activating both homologous and imaginary identifications” of its audiences (143), further complicating notions of Southern, rural, and/or white identity at the time. For both early blues and country, Brackett’s chapters reopen a rich and varied musical landscape.

The next section of the book (chapters 5 and 6) is devoted to the 1940s, again with two case studies that focus on black and white popular musical categories respectively. Chapter 5 (“From Jazz to Pop: Swing in the 1940s”) interrogates the relationships between three of the 1940s’ most important genres: swing, jazz, and popular music. The decade opened with the height of swing’s popularity, a genre which spread “forms of improvisation and groove associated with African Americans among heterogeneous audiences” (185). But by the end of the decade, “within the realm of mainstream popular music, African American-ness appeared as a stereotype grouped with stereotypes of assorted Others” (185). In other words, black popular music lost mainstream viability as the decade progressed, and in order to gain popularity with mainstream audiences, race music recordings were required “to cite the conventions of the novelty genre” (184). In chapter 6 (“The Corny-ness of the Folk”), Brackett describes how the same uptick in novelty allowed country music to follow a nearly opposite narrative, from a place of ill-defined exteriority in the first half of the decade to the nominalized dual entity of “country and western” in the latter half. The chiastic trajectories of race music and country music, and the way that these large-scale categories interacted with notions of racial identity and the mainstream, closely mirrored larger trends in musical and cultural affairs. Brackett explains how “African American-ness” got drained out of the mainstream, requiring its own othered “apparatus for the valuation of economic capital” (183), reinforcing a stereotypical black identity by the late 1940s. On the other hand, country’s newfound mainstream success “disturbed notions of homological” relation between the music and a rural, white, Southern identity, creating an awareness of the label’s “insufficiency” (228).

These divergent paths occurred during the gradual synchronization and consolidation of the music industry, which solidified around the end of the second World War, as marketing, advertising, and demographic research reached new levels of sophistication and made possible the first quantifiable era of “mainstream” popular music. Out of these distinctions—between the unmarked mainstream and its marked others—Brackett develops a central concept in his book: crossover. Though anachronistically applied and only defined in chapter 8, for Brackett crossover is only possible when industry categories and stable rankings of popularity or success (especially charts) become widespread and relatively consistent. Only then can genres be defined by their independence from the mainstream, and only then can certain ambassadors cross from one chart to another. In the second half of his book, covering the 50-year span from the 1940s to about 1990, Brackett emphasizes the “circular logic” of crossover, or how some tracks or artists in non-mainstream genres (R&B, jazz, country, etc.) find mainstream success while others remain relegated to their marked groupings.

Brackett’s chapter on R&B and Soul in the 1960s (“The Dictionary of Soul”) is in many ways exemplary of the entire project. The aim, he explains, “is to analyze the stakes involved for the musicians, fans, journalists, and music industry personnel” who associate generic labels “in a more or less consistent way with certain musical processes and gestures” (236). So, when a disjunction occurs within these more or less consistent applications of generic labels, Brackett seizes the opportunity to interrogate the generic conditions at stake. From 1963 to 1965, Billboard suddenly stopped printing their “R&B” popularity chart, a unique gap in an otherwise uninterrupted strand of industry-sanctioned African-American popular music categories that began with the stabilization of “race records” in the 1920s, and which lives on in Billboard’s current “hip-hop and R&B” moniker.  Surely R&B music still existed, and people still bought, sold, made, listened to, and thought about music that participated in or represented the genre, so why did Billboard stop their chart? For Brackett, the blip that this interregnum registers on the popular-music–genre seismometer functions as much more than a curious historical footnote of one (important) part of the popular music machine; it presents a chance to explore the confluences and contradictions of musical and social worlds, of understanding how “the struggle over racial classification itself ” that structured much of the 1960s might (not) relate to concomitant musical classifications (236). By analyzing shifting usages of the word “soul,” along with the effects that folk-rock and the British invasion had on the mainstream, Brackett documents competing notions of racial identity and musical expression during an especially tumultuous moment in US popular culture. Originating as an adjectival descriptor and growing into a nominalized genre, “soul” captures some of the tensions inherent in the Civil Rights Movement between an integrationist discourse (reflected by R&B’s Billboard gap) and one of black cultural independence that required a new, unique African American genre label.

Brackett’s project reaches its apotheosis in chapter 8 (“Crossover Dreams: From Urban Cowboy to the King of Pop”), a discussion of crossover and its effects in the 1980s, a time when marketing categories, radio formats, new influential genres (like punk, disco, new wave, adult contemporary), social identities, and the introduction of a new medium (MTV) produced a unique “field of tensions”  in popular music (301). By again comparing the fates of black popular genres and mainstream-adjacent white popular musics, Brackett outlines the economic and social forces that policed musical borders, along with their consequent material results. Both country and R&B, for lack of better terms, bifurcated in the early 1980s between mainstream and marginal subtypes, but country more easily crossed over at the beginning of the decade (and found more financial success) since—among other reasons—its synecdochal style elements could blend directly into unmarked pop (293). Seen as more serious and wholesome than funk, disco, or R&B, crossover country exploded in popularity by adapting conventional country instrumentation into adult contemporary musics. Black popular music genres, on the other hand, were understood to be rather more “transgressive” as a general conservatism swept the nation, and they fared much worse in their ability to garner majoritarian interest. Because of this, the mega-success of Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1983)—made possible by citation of his previous success, his inclusion of crossover stylistic elements and general stylistic eclecticism, and his collaboration with mainstream artists like Paul McCartney and Van Halen—was doubly extraordinary for an artist classified as R&B who carried with him connotations of disco. Thriller created a “sudden surge of interest in black crossover material” in its wake, upending the mainstream (314). The resulting categorizational turbulence, along with those new media and marketing categories mentioned above, problematized the very notion of mainstream in the 1980s. Brackett suggests “the whole idea of the mainstream underwent changes that led to a new way of conceptualizing the hierarchy of genres that might participate in it” (314) as previously marginal genres would occasionally ascend to popularity. But by the 1990s, the popular music field would again settle into a relatively stable constellation of musical categories, as music videos, Brackett suggests, provided new means of “compactly materializing associations” between sound, artists, and audiences (324).

Throughout these case studies, a few long-range strands of historical narrative emerge—e.g., how technological innovations of reproduction galvanized a novel “sonic aesthetic,” how unstable industry terms for African American popular music categories stem from different sets of discourses and agencies than those of non-mainstream white music, or how the strength of “crossover effect” mutates over time. But these occasionally get lost in the microscopic specificity of Brackett’s meticulous musicological research, requiring the reader to consciously track larger-range ideas as they bubble to the surface. And though these emergent continuities may not be Brackett’s central aim, the fact that they arise so naturally might leave the reader in want of a synopsis of these broad themes. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of theory, history, and analysis to digest, and Brackett bookends each case-study with an exemplary introductory anecdote and a few welcome pages of summary, helping the reader absorb the deluge of information in each chapter.

Though the book is comprehensive and coherent throughout, a few weaknesses pepper some sections, resulting from editorial challenges inevitable for a project that combines so much previous work; much of chapters 1, 2, 7, and 8, at least, find precedence in Brackett’s earlier publications. This upcycling is not problematic in itself, but it does result in the occasional stutter, shifting between materials from different stages of a long gestation. Prior published subtitles for the book—“Genre and Identity in Twentieth-Century Popular Music” and “A Generic History of Popular Music”—reveal two overriding goals Brackett has melded into this work, which sporadically compete for attention and space.1 The book reads either as a broadly focused history of the relation between the mainstream and its largest tributaries or as a focused study of race and identity in popular music at particular historical moments. This means that, for example, some chapters and concepts get reutilized. Chapter 5, for instance, re-introduces its upcoming trajectory multiple times to cover distinct goals, and some concepts get repackaged in separate chapters—e.g., Hagstrom Miller’s (2007) folkloristic mode of authenticity (74, 123) or Sterne’s (2003) “audile technique” (37, 57). Additionally, some bibliographical entries seem culled from prior versions with no mention in the book, and there are some inevitable omissions. For instance, a couple of especially conspicuous and relevant sources include Tamara Roberts’s (2011) work on Michael Jackson, race, and the mainstream, which covers much the same ground as Brackett’s final case study, and Hubbs’s (2014) study of country music and identity, which would certainly have provided useful contextualization for many of Brackett’s claims about country and its predecessors. Overall, however, this is a diligently researched book, and necessarily so, with a bibliography that spans many inter- and subdisciplines. A few of these could be fruitfully augmented with recent literatures, opening potential avenues for scholars more directly interested in bringing feminist, critical race, or post-colonial theories to bear on popular music categories.2

Besides its careful research and novel historiography, Categorizing Sound might be most valuable for those aspects of popular music’s genre-cartography it leaves unexplored. Little is said about hip hop and funk and the 1950s and 1970s serve merely as contextual fodder. Chronologically, one might extend Brackett’s ideas in either direction, for example, placing them in dialogue with Stoever’s (2016) recent work on race, the listening ear, and the sonic color line beginning in the nineteenth century. Moving in the other direction, researchers of our current musical era will find many uncanny similarities in the historical realms Brackett probes. The move that streaming services have made towards psychographic marketing (James 2017b) resembles paradigm shifts of categorization in the 1920s and the 1980s, and the intensification of identity and of fine-grained musical classification (e.g., as studied by Greenberg et al. 2016) finds precedence in the minute differentiations between subcategories of foreign music— distinguishing between, for example, “Neapolitan and Italian” or “Jewish and Hebrew” (57). Diachronic studies just outside musicology’s usual orbit (e.g., Lena’s [2012] discussion of individual genres’ trajectories through predictable stages or Mauch et al.’s [2015] scientific analysis of popular music’s stylistic evolution) could also be usefully developed by incorporating Brackett’s nuanced historical research. Sociologies of omnivorousness might also benefit from Brackett’s deeper history of taste and audiences.

There’s an inherent difficulty in applying a single methodology or theoretical apparatus to any selection of musical categories and historical contexts, and Brackett admits he has codified no single way “to do genre analysis” (331). Instead, Categorizing Sound presents a broad selection of tools and attitudes that might guide future investigations of the changing configurations of genre, identity, and popular music. Like any study of genre, Categorizing Sound ramifies across discourses, and its many valuable musicological contributions will hopefully proliferate throughout and beyond the discipline.

• These prior subtitles can be found in the AMS book publication subvention awards listing (h t tp://www.ams-net.org/pubs/Publication-subventions-2015-fall.php) and Brackett (2015, 205),
• Brackett briefly mentions Judith Butler, Paul Gilroy, and Homi Bhabha when discussing genre’s and identity’s performativities, for instance (38n50), but I believe a theory of genre that more directly incorporates their (and similar writers’) works might be a beneficial pursuit.

Born, Georgina. 2000. “Music and the Representation/Articulation of Sociocultural Identities.” In Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music , edited by Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, 31–47. Berkeley: University of California Press.

———. 2011. “Music and the Materialization of Identities.” Journal of Material Culture 16 (4): 376–88.

Brackett, David. 2015. “Popular Music Genres: Aesthetics, Commerce and Identity.” In The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music , edited by Andy Bennett and Steve Waksman, 189–Los Angeles: SAGE Publications.

Burns, Lori. 2000. “Genre, Gender, and Convention Revisited: K. D. Lang’s Cover of Cole Porter’s ‘So in Love.’” Repercussions 7–8: 299–325.

Drott, Eric. 2013. “The End(s) of Genre.” Journal of Music Theory 57 (1): 1–45.

Greenberg, David M., Michal Kosinski, David J. Stillwell, Brian L. Monteiro, Daniel J. Levitin, and Peter J. Rentfrow. 2016. “The Song Is You: Preferences for Musical Attribute Dimensions Reflect Personality.” Social Psychological and Personality Science 7 (6): 1–9.

Hagstrom Miller, Karl. 2010. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of  Jim Crow . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hubbs, Nadine. 2014. Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music . Berkeley: University of California Press.

James, Robin. 2017a. “Is the Post- in Post-Identity the Post- in Post-Genre?” Popular Music  36 (1): 21–32.

———. 2017b. “Songs of Myself.” Real Life , May, 2017.  http://reallifemag.com/songs-of-myself. Lena, Jennifer C. 2012. Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular  Music . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Mauch, Matthias, Robert M. MacCallum, Mark Levy, and Armand M. Leroi. 2015. “The Evolution of Popular Music: USA 1960–2010.” Royal Society Open Science 2: 1–10.

Roberts, Tamara. 2011. “Michael Jackson’s Kingdom: Music, Race, and the Sound of the Mainstream.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 23 (1): 19–39.

Robin, William. 2016. “A Scene Without a Name: Indie Classical and American New Music in the Twenty-First Century.” PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Smialek, Eric. 2015. “Genre and Expression in Extreme Metal Music, Ca. 1990–2015.” PhD diss., McGill University.

Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. 2016. The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening . New York: NYU Press.

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Genre Classification in Music using Convolutional Neural Networks

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With the advancement of technology and computational power, crafting a chart-topping song has become more effortless than before, achievable from the convenience of our residences with just a computer at hand. This has led to the emergence of vast arrays of catalogs of music, containing a variety of genres and styles from different music makers with different ethnicities and backgrounds, resulting in a large database that clogs most music streaming platforms with little automated categorization. Based on the GTZAN audio dataset, this paper revisits the use of Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) for classifying different types of music genres. Using Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) features, the CNN model achieved an accuracy of 85%. As a result of the careful design of the CNN model, it is on par with many latest and greatest CNN frameworks.

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Bawitlung, A., Dash, S.K. (2024). Genre Classification in Music using Convolutional Neural Networks. In: Badioze Zaman, H., et al. Advances in Visual Informatics. IVIC 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14322. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7339-2_33

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Title: exploring music genre classification: algorithm analysis and deployment architecture.

Abstract: Music genre classification has become increasingly critical with the advent of various streaming applications. Nowadays, we find it impossible to imagine using the artist's name and song title to search for music in a sophisticated music app. It is always difficult to classify music correctly because the information linked to music, such as region, artist, album, or non-album, is so variable. This paper presents a study on music genre classification using a combination of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and Deep Learning (DL) techniques. A novel algorithm is proposed that utilizes both DSP and DL methods to extract relevant features from audio signals and classify them into various genres. The algorithm was tested on the GTZAN dataset and achieved high accuracy. An end-to-end deployment architecture is also proposed for integration into music-related applications. The performance of the algorithm is analyzed and future directions for improvement are discussed. The proposed DSP and DL-based music genre classification algorithm and deployment architecture demonstrate a promising approach for music genre classification.

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