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Concept
Soul music
Summary
Soul music is a popular music genre that originated in the African American community throughout the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It has its roots in African-American gospel music and rhythm and blues. Soul music became popular for dancing and listening, where U.S. record labels such as Motown, Atlantic and Stax were influential during the Civil Rights Movement. Soul also became popular around the world, directly influencing rock music and the music of Africa. It also had a resurgence with artists like Erykah Badu under the genre neo-soul.
Catchy rhythms, stressed by handclaps and extemporaneous body moves, are an important feature of soul music. Other characteristics are a call and response between the lead vocalist and the chorus and an especially tense vocal sound. The style also occasionally uses improvisational additions, twirls, and auxiliary sounds. Soul music reflects the African-American identity, and it stresses the importance of an African-American culture. The new-found African-American consciousness led to new styles of music that boasted pride in being black, and being such a creative genre of music, it emerged from the power struggle to increase black Americans' awareness of their African ancestry. Soul music also combines different elements of music which includes gospel music, rhythm and blues and jazz.
Soul music dominated the U.S. R&B chart in the 1960s, and many recordings crossed over into the pop charts in the U.S., Britain, and elsewhere. By 1968, the soul music genre had begun to splinter. Some soul artists developed funk music, while other singers and groups developed slicker, more sophisticated, and in some cases more politically conscious varieties. Many soul artists gained popularity due to the domination of soul music in the R&B charts. Among these artists were Ray Charles, James Brown and the soul group the Temptations. By the early 1970s, soul music had been influenced by psychedelic and progressive rock, among other genres, leading to psychedelic and progressive soul.
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Ontological neighbourhood
Related publications (2)
On the design of audio features robust to the album-effect for music information retrieval
Short-term spectral features – and most notably Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) – are the most widely used descriptors of audio signals and are deployed in a majority of state-of-the-art Music Information Retrieval (MIR) systems. These descript ...
EPFL2009Related people (1)
Related concepts (25)
Hip hop music
Hip hop or hip-hop, also known as rap and formerly known as disco rap, is a genre of popular music that was originated in the Bronx borough of New York City in the early 1970s by African Americans, having existed for several years prior to mainstream discovery. Hip hop originated as an anti-drug and anti-violence genre, while consisting of stylized rhythmic music (usually built around drum beats) that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted.
Rhythm and blues
Rhythm and blues, frequently abbreviated as R&B or R'n'B, is a genre of popular music that originated in African-American communities in the 1940s. The term was originally used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly to African Americans, at a time when "rocking, jazz based music ... [with a] heavy, insistent beat" was becoming more popular. In the commercial rhythm and blues music typical of the 1950s through the 1970s, the bands usually consisted of a piano, one or two guitars, bass, drums, one or more saxophones, and sometimes background vocalists.
Ska
Ska (skaː; skjæ) is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1950s and was the precursor to rocksteady and reggae. It combined elements of Caribbean mento and calypso with American jazz and rhythm and blues. Ska is characterized by a walking bass line accented with rhythms on the off beat. It was developed in Jamaica in the 1960s when Stranger Cole, Prince Buster, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, and Duke Reid formed sound systems to play American rhythm and blues and then began recording their own songs.