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Hybrids and Fragments

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Hybrids and Fragments Hybrids and Fragments Music, Genre, Culture and Technology Author Supervisor Justin Mark GAGEN Dr. Christophe RHODES Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science GOLDSMITHS,UNIVERSITY OF LONDON DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTING November 18, 2019 1 Declaration of Authorship I, Justin Mark Gagen, declare that the work presented in this thesis is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is clearly stated. Signed: Date: November 18, 2019 2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors, Dr. Christophe Rhodes and Dr. Dhiraj Murthy. You have both been invaluable! Thanks are due to Prof. Tim Crawford for initiating the Transforming Musicology project, and providing advice at regular intervals. To my Transforming Musicology compatriots, Richard, David, Ben, Gabin, Daniel, Alan, Laurence, Mark, Kevin, Terhi, Carolin, Geraint, Nick, Ken and Frans: my thanks for all of the useful feedback and advice over the course of the project. I would also like to thank the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London; my home from home. This work was enabled by the AHRC Digital Transformations Project, Transforming Musicology. I am grateful for their support. To my examination panel, Dr. Marco Gillies, Dr. Christopher Haworth and Dr. Simon Katan, appreciation is due. Your comments were most helpful. Special thanks are due to all of my friends and family, but special mentions go to Richard, Tim, Sophie, Hilary, Nicky, Alex, Harvey, Polly, Alick, Richard J, Rosa, James, Imogen, Ben, Vanessa, Christophe, Oana, Nina, Philip, Danai, Halit, Kevin, Ed, Winnie and, though we lost them in recent times, Bianca, Eileen, Colin and Jo. Finally, thank you Ami. You are my guiding light. 3 Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us? LAWRENCE DURRELL Justine (1960) Our music foretells our future. Let us lend it an ear. JACQUES ATTALI Noise (1977) Genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix genres. JACQUES DERRIDA The Law of Genre (1980) Maybe the Internet raised us. LORDE A World Alone (2013) 4 Abstract Technologies are fundamental to music and its marketing and dissemination, as is the categorisation of music by genre. In this research we examine the relationship between musical genre and technology by examining genre proliferation, fragmenta- tion and hybridity. We compare the movement of musical artists between genres in various technological eras, and evaluate the connections between the dissemination of music and its categorisation. Cultural hybridity and fragmentation is thought to be the norm in the globalised era by many scholars, and the online music environment appears to be populated by hy- brid genres and micro-genres. To examine this we study the representation of musi- cal genre on the Internet. We acquire data from three main sources: The Echo Nest, a music-intelligence system, and two collectively constructed knowledge-bases, Wiki- data and MusicBrainz. We discover geographical and commercial biases. We calculate genre inception dates in order to examine category proliferation, and construct networks from these data, using the relationships between artists and gen- res to establish structure. Using network analyses to quantify genre hybridity we find increasing hybridisation, peaking at various periods in different datasets. Statistical analyses, comparing hybridity within our various data, validates our method and re- veals a relationship between the activity of editing music information and the move- ment of musical artists between musical genres. We also find evidence for the fragmentation of genre and the appearance of micro- genres. We consider artists that are invisible in mainstream systems using data from three alternative platforms, Bandcamp, CD Baby and SoundCloud, and examine rapid genre proliferation in Spotify. We then discuss hybridity and fragmentation in relation to postmodernity, hypermodernity and unimodernity, music and genre within soci- ety, and the ways genre intersects with technology. 5 Contents 1 Introduction 15 1.1 Music, Genre, Culture and Technology . 15 1.2 Methodological Notes . 20 1.3 Definitions . 21 1.4 Aims . 22 1.5 Contributions . 23 1.6 Focus . 24 1.7 Thesis Outline . 25 2 Music 27 2.1 Introduction . 27 2.2 Music . 27 2.3 Recording . 30 2.4 Digitisation . 33 2.5 Datafication . 35 2.6 Summary . 38 3 Genre 39 3.1 Introduction . 39 3.2 Genre as Fundamental . 39 3.3 Genres and History . 41 3.4 Genre as System . 42 3.5 Genre as Social . 43 3.6 Musical Genre and Commerce . 46 3.7 Genre and Music Information Retrieval . 48 3.8 Summary . 50 6 4 The Internet 51 4.1 Introduction . 51 4.2 Globalisation, The Internet and Social Media . 51 4.3 The Internet and Music . 55 4.4 Summary . 58 5 Hybridity and Fragmentation 59 5.1 Introduction . 59 5.2 Hybridity and Globalisation . 59 5.3 Hybridity and The Internet . 62 5.4 Hybridity and Music . 63 5.5 Hybridity and Genre . 65 5.6 Fragmentation and Modernity . 67 5.7 Summary . 70 6 Musical Genre Data 71 6.1 Introduction . 71 6.2 The Echo Nest Dataset . 72 6.2.1 Introduction . 72 6.2.2 Acquisition . 73 6.2.3 Data Format . 74 6.3 Spotify Genre Numbers . 74 6.3.1 Introduction . 74 6.3.2 Every Noise At Once Data . 75 6.4 The MusicBrainz Dataset . 76 6.4.1 Introduction . 76 6.4.2 Acquisition . 76 6.4.3 Data Composition . 77 6.4.4 MusicBrainz User-Tag Dataset . 83 6.5 Composite Datasets . 84 6.5.1 Introduction . 84 6.5.2 Date Processing . 84 6.5.3 The ‘Hotttnesss’ Metric . 87 6.6 The Wikidata Dataset . 88 6.6.1 Introduction . 88 6.6.2 Acquisition . 88 7 6.7 Bandcamp, CD Baby and SoundCloud . 89 6.7.1 Introduction . 89 6.7.2 Bandcamp . 90 6.7.3 CD Baby . 90 6.7.4 SoundCloud . 91 6.7.5 Comparable Genres . 92 6.8 Discussion . 93 6.9 Summary . 97 7 Genre Inception and Proliferation 98 7.1 Introduction . 98 7.2 Genre Inception . 98 7.2.1 Introduction . 98 7.2.2 Echo Nest/Musicbrainz Date-Corrected Genre Inception . 99 7.2.3 Echo Nest/Musicbrainz Minimal Genre Inception . 100 7.2.4 MusicBrainz Genre Inception . 101 7.3 Temporal Categories . 102 7.3.1 Introduction . 102 7.3.2 Classification by Technology . 102 7.4 Genre Proliferation . 106 7.4.1 Introduction . 106 7.4.2 Date-corrected Genre Proliferation . 106 7.4.3 Minimal Dataset Genre Proliferation . 107 7.4.4 MusicBrainz Tag Data Genre Proliferation . 107 7.4.5 Proliferation via Fragmentation . 108 7.5 Discussion . 108 7.6 Summary . 109 8 Musical Genre Networks 110 8.1 Introduction . 110 8.2 Genre Networks . 110 8.2.1 Echo Nest Genre Networks . 112 8.2.2 MusicBrainz Genre Networks . 114 8.2.3 Wikidata Genre Networks . 115 8.3 Genre Network Comparison . 116 8.3.1 Matched, Temporal Networks . 117 8 8.3.2 Degree Comparison . 119 8.4 Discussion . 121 8.5 Summary . 123 9 Musical Genre Hybridity 124 9.1 Introduction . 124 9.2 Genre Hybridity . 125 9.2.1 Node Hybridity . ..
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