The Bible and Music

How are musical pieces distinguished from one another? How are different songs divided into groups and separated? Music is commonly grouped according to genre.  A “genre” is a “a category of artistic composition…characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter.” Most genres consist of songs that are similar in regards to pitch, amplitude, key, tempo, and how often the piece repeats certain phrases. Still, there is some disagreement when trying to categorize these songs. Religious music is far-harder to categorize than rock, rap, country, or pop. This is due to the fact that religious music can be composed with regards to either of (but not limited to) these genres. So if a song is composed with biblical references, but has similar characteristics to other rock songs, what is the genre? Is this a christian song or is this a rock song? Can this song be both? When we categorize a song incorrectly, are our ears playing tricks on us, or is it possible that we are still correct, because a single song can be categorized as more than one genre. There is actually a program that was recently created by “a group led by Arijit Ghosal of the Neotia Institute of Technology Management and Science” that will use pitch analysis to categorize different songs into different genres. The software will analyze common pitch features, tempo, amplitude variation patterns, and beats per minute using specific mathematics algorithms, and will compare the results to other songs within a specific genre. This seems to work well, but the only issue with the software, that I noticed (unless I was misinformed), was that the software did not analyse the lyrics of the song that it was trying got categorize. This is an issue, because the only aspects that make Christian rock songs “Christian” are the lyrics. For this reason, I feel that some genres tend to overlap. When trying to categorize a song, it seems as if you have to place a song along a spectrum rather than in a distinct category. Religious music seems to be where this is more common. Contemporary Christian songs would be good examples of pieces that this software could not distinguish, especially because Contemporary Christian Music is considered to be modern. Over time, the term “modern” changes. For this reason, and many others, religious music is difficult to categorize into a single genre, and is instead is typically sub-categorized.

http://newatlas.com/automatic-music-genre-classification-system/38240/