Sonic-Social Genre

Workshop on humanist and computer science approaches to musical genre at Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany.

by Mimi Haddon

This post shares some reflections on a four-day workshop at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany in May 2023. The event was led and organised by anthropologist, musicologist, and social scientist Professor Georgina Born and its focus was the points of convergence and divergence between humanist approaches to musical genre and those in computer science, focusing to some extent on music-genre recognition.

A well earned dinner after the four day workshop. The real reason for European research projects.

I joined as part of the humanist contingent as a result of my work on genre in What is Post-Punk? Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977-82 (University of Michigan Press, 2020 – out now in paperback!) and my chapter in a forthcoming collection titled, Music and Genre: New Directions (Duke University Press, forthcoming), edited by Born and David Brackett, who also participated in the workshop. We three were joined by Anton Blackburn, Eric Drott, Klaus Frieler, Owen Green, Christopher Haworth, Christabel Stirling, Lara Pearson, Will Straw, Bob Sturm, and Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann.

The conversations were open-ended, experimental, and informal. Our topics ranged from approaches to genre in musicology (specifically Brackett’s 2016 book, Categorizing Sound), Born’s work on music’s social mediations and Straw’s work on scenes, to the precise way Shazam functions, Bayesian statistics, and the potentialities of music data sets. I was asked to respond to two papers on internet genres, one by Howarth on microsound, hauntology, hypnagogic pop and vaporwave, and the other by Blackburn on hyperpop.

My reflections covered six loose areas: (1) (Il)legibility; (2) Temporality; (3) Levels and Context; (4) the Unconscious of Genres; (5) Subjectivity in relation to Born’s 2011 article; and (6) “Extra-Musicological Sprawl.” As someone who is interested in the social and discursive mediation of popular music genres, my comments responded in ways that aligned with my musicology and cultural studies interests and expertise, and my emergent interest in gendered knowledge formations. On illegibility, I was interested in genres that fail to take hold in popular music culture and genres that are illegible to outsiders, e.g. the seeming impenetrability of the symbolic system in hyperpop to millennials, gen X, and boomers. On temporality and levels, I observed the way the internet potentially speeds up a genre’s process of emergence and how, perhaps unconsciously invoking Fredric Jameson, internet genres dissolve and tangle historical time. I wondered, too, how internet-based genres were nested and interrelated.

On the unconscious of musical genres, I was very much drawn to a sentence in Born and Howarth’s 2017 article, in which they describe what wasn’t allowed to be discussed on the microsound listserv, insofar as it “[discouraged] exchanges on equipment, record collecting, music-making.” This suggested to me that genres could have a discursive unconscious. Can computer science cope with this and, if so, how? Finally, in listening to work by Haworth and Blackburn, I was struck by the extra-musicological/extra-musical connotations of both genres. In the case of hyperpop, video games and social media appear imbricated with the genre in complex ways, and in the case of hauntology, I was struck by how reminiscent it was (in retrospect) of concurrent television programmes “about” media archaeology, such as the comedy series Look Around You (2002-2005). In short, how do data sets and computer scientists manage, represent, and understand such unpredictable but rich cultural contingencies?

In all, this was a stimulating and productive four days contemplating the challenges ahead for the humanities and computer sciences.

Shout out to what we nicknamed the “sky bar” at the Fleming’s Hotel… (it wasn’t really a sky bar).

Follow up reading

Blackburn, A. (2021). Queering accelerationism: Virtual ethnography, PC Music, and the temporal politics of queerness [Master’s]. Oxford.

Born, G. (2011). Music and the materialization of identities. Journal of Material Culture, 16 (4), 376–388. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183511424196

Born, G. (forthcoming). Time and Musical Genre. In G. Born & D. Brackett (Eds.), Music and Genre: New Directions.

Born, G., & Haworth, C. (2017). From microsound to vaporwave: Internet-mediated musics, online methods, and genre. Music and Letters, 98(4), 601–647. https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcx095

Brackett, D. (2016). Introduction. In Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-Century Popular Music (pp. 1–40). University of California Press.

Drott, E. (2013). The End(s) of Genre. Journal of Music Theory, 57(1), 1–45. https://doi.org/10.1215/00222909-2017097

Drott, E. (forthcoming). Genre in the age of algorithms. In G. Born & D. Brackett (Eds.), Music and Genre: New Directions.

Frieler, K. (2018). A feature history of jazz improvisation. In W. Knauer (Ed.), Jazz @ 100 (Vol. 15, pp. 67–90). Wolke Verlag.

Hesmondhalgh, D. (2005). Subcultures, scenes or tribes? None of the above. Journal of Youth Studies, 8(1), 21–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676260500063652

Stirling, C. (2016). ‘Beyond the Dance Floor’? Gendered Publics and Creative Practices in Electronic Dance Music. Contemporary Music Review, 35(1), 130–149. https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1176772

Straw, W. (1991). Systems of articulation, logics of change: Communities and scenes in popular music. Cultural Studies, 5(3), 368–388. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502389100490311

Sturm, B. L. (2014). The state of the art ten years after a state of the art: Future research in music information retrieval. Journal of New Music Research, 43(2), 147–172. https://doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2014.894533