Scanning the Dial: The Rapid Recognition of Music Genres

Given brief excerpts of commercially recorded music in one of ten broad genres of music, participants in this study were asked to evaluate each excerpt and to assign it to one of the ten genre labels. It was expected that participants would be good at this task, since they were the very consumers for whom much of this music had been created. But the speed at which participants could perform this task, including above-chance categorizations of excerpts as short as 1/4 second, was quite unexpected.