The mysterious "genre" field

[Igor Baltiyskiy]

Hi everyone,

 

In the HDF5 files in /metadata/songs dataset there is a member with name “genre”. A few songs that I peeked at had empty value for that member. Also, this field is missing from the fields list on the MSD site. Can you elaborate, is genre set for any songs in the MSD? If yes, how many songs have this field set?

 

Yours sincerely,

Igor Baltiyskiy

 

[Thierry Bertin-Mahieux]

Hi Igor,
unfortunately, this field should have been removed in the final version of the dataset, and is empty for all million songs.
There were discussion about setting it to something meaningful, maybe from tags, to create a new genre recognition dataset. But this was a bad idea, later dropped, and the field remained by mistake.
You can always infer a genre (from tags, years, lyrics, ...), but like all genre recognition sources it would only be a bad proxy.
Thierry

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Thierry Bertin-Mahieux
Columbia University, NY
Ph.D. Candidate, Electrical Engineering
http://www.columbia.edu/~tb2332/