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Musical genre is probably the most popular music descriptor. In the context of large musical databases and Electronic Music Distribution, genre is therefore a crucial metadata for the description of music content. However, genre is intrinsically ill-defined and attempts at defining genre precisely have a strong tendency to end up in circular, ungrounded projections of fantasies. Is genre an intrinsic attribute of music titles, as, say, tempo? Or is genre a extrinsic description of the whole piece? In this article, we discuss the various approaches in representing musical genre, and propose to classify these approaches in three main categories: manual, prescriptive and emergent approaches. We discuss the pros and cons of each approach, and illustrate our study with results of the Cuidado IST project.
Aucouturier et al. (Sat,) studied this question.