The notion of a musical artist’s or genre’s sound is frequently evoked, but what sonic parameters define this sound? We address this question through an in-depth corpus analysis of 100 critically and commercially acclaimed hip-hop tracks from the genre’s golden age that we define as 1986–1996. We operationalize the term sound as the sum of both musical and production parameters. The practices of music theory and critical listening are brought together to analyze each track across 75 musical and production parameters in 9 categories. Through statistical analysis of our data set, we demonstrate that from these parameters we are capable of assembling groups of songs that sound alike. These groups are then compared against pre-existing groupings such as geographical location and recording label.

Authors: Martin, Denis; Duinker, Ben; Benson, David
Affiliations: McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada; Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT), Montreal, Quebec, Canada(See document for exact affiliation information.)
AES Convention: 140 (May 2016) eBrief:276
Publication Date: May 26, 2016
Subject: eBriefs: Lectures

Click to purchase paper as a non-member or you can login as an AES member to see more options.

No AES members have commented on this paper yet.

Subscribe to this discussion

To be notified of new comments on this paper you can subscribe to this RSS feed. Forum users should login to see additional options.

Start a discussion!

If you would like to start a discussion about this paper and are an AES member then you can login here:
Username:
Password:

If you are not yet an AES member and have something important to say about this paper then we urge you to join the AES today and make your voice heard. You can join online today by clicking here.