The Role of Culture in Music Information Retrieval: A Model of Negotiated Musical Meaning, and its Implications in Methodology and Evaluation of the Music Genre Classification Task

This thesis proposes a new methodology for evaluation of automatic music genre classification. It is argued that the common tacit understanding that genre is an attribute of a piece is unsound, and that genre is better understood as an attribute given to a piece by a group of people. As a direct consequence of this, different groups will assign different genre labels to the same piece