MUMBAI: A recent research in New Journal of Physics on this week proposes an interesting idea that will give listeners a better idea about why he/she likes a particular kind of music
The new research says that ‘rhythm is the key to finding music you like and not genre,’ says the paper which was published by a group of Brazilian researchers.
According to the research, it is possible to correctly identify the musical genres of specific musical pieces by studying similar and different characteristics of rhythmic durations, occurrence and sequences….
The researchers studied four musical genres – rock, blues, bossa nova and reggae – looking at 100 songs from each category, analysing the most representative sequences of each genre-specific rhythm such as the 12 bar theme in blues, which means that the song is divided into 12 bars – or measures – with a given chord sequence.
Using hierarchical clustering, a visual representation of rhythmic frequencies, the researchers were able to discriminate between songs and come up with a possibly novel way of defining musical genres.
Albert King ‘s Stormy Monday, B B King’s How Blue Can You Get, John Lee Hooker ‘s Dimples, Stevie Ray Vaughan Scuttle Buttin were part of Blues and Bosa Nova samples.
While the Reggae and rock art works samples included songs like Ace Of Bass’ All That She Wants, Big Mountain ‘s Baby I Love Your Way, Bob Marley’s I Shot The Sheriff, Beatles’I Want To Hold Your Hand, Metallica’s One and Pearl Jam’s Jeremy
“With our proposed method, new sub-genres (for example, rock–blues) can arise from original ones,” it said.
By showing that rhythm represents a surprisingly distinctive signature of some of the main musical genres, the work suggests that rhythm-based features could be more comprehensively incorporated as resources for searching in music platforms.
“It is clear from our study that musical genres are very complex and that they present redundancies. Sometimes it is difficult even for an expert to distinguish them. This difficulty becomes more critical when only the rhythm is taken into account,” the report mentioned.
The next step, as suggested by the researchers, is related to the synthesis of rhythms. “Once the rhythmic networks are available, new rhythms with similar characteristics according to the specific genre can be artificially generated.”