Abstract: Automatic genre classification of music has been of interest for researchers over a decade. Many success-ful methods and machine learning algorithms have been developed achieving reasonably good results. This thesis explores automatic sub-genre classification problem of one of the most popular meta-genres, heavy metal. To the best of my knowledge this is the first attempt to study the issue. Besides attempting automatic classification, the thesis investigates sub-genre taxonomy of heavy metal music, highlighting the historical origins and the most prominent musical features of its sub-genres.
For classification, an algorithm proposed in (Barbedo & Lopes, 2007) was modified and implemented in MATLAB. The obtained results were compared to other commonly used classifiers such as AdaBoost and K-nearest neighbours. For each classifier two sets of features were employed selected using two strategies: Correlation based feature selection and Wrapper selection. A dataset consisting of 210 tracks representing seven genres was used for testing the classification algorithms. Implemented algorithm classified 37.1% of test samples correctly, which is significantly better performance than random classification (14.3%). However, it was not the best achieved result among the classifiers tested. The best result with correct classification rate of 45.7% was achieved by AdaBoost algorithm.
(Source: https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/37227#)

Abstract: This dissertation examines how the analog-digital transition influenced the development of extreme metal, interpreting its present obsession with fine sub-generic distinctions and “old-school” revivals of analog aesthetics as a means of coping with an uneasy dependence on digital media. While extreme metal’s values developed in analog networks, its transcendence of aural and bodily limits required digital prostheses. The digital divide in accessing these contested technologies structured extreme metal’s system of subgenres, which—like the remembered inconveniences of the past—memorialize now-lost resistances.
This dissertation’s arc is conceptual and chronological. Its introduction and conclusion frame its inquiry with present concerns, while the inner chapters are case studies that progress from undifferentiated analog beginnings in the 1980s to sub-generic crystallization up to the arrival of the digital audio workstation in the mid-1990s. Using archival materials, newly conducted interviews, and close readings of musical records, these case studies put vernacular theories into dialog with discourses drawn from the musicology of record production, music theory, and critical theory. Ultimately, these constellations aim to articulate a constitutive relationship between what it means to analyze, make, and enjoy popular music. This dissertation’s contributions are twofold. First, it provides models for the analysis of popular music grounded in the historically conditioned values of an aesthetic community—and how these values are adapted to disruptions. Second, this dissertation argues that (sub-)genre, as the promise of being able to repeat (increasingly narrow) aesthetic experiences, requires technologies that make this repetition possible—at least in fantasy. The Introduction uses ethnographic vignettes to establish the contemporary importance of sub-genre and nostalgia.
Chapter 1 asks why pioneering musicians can claim to have heard extreme metal before it existed, by manipulating the time-axis of existing records on tape or vinyl players. This fetish-like objectification of creativity reflects a disavowal of subjective creativity. Chapter 2 analyzes death metal drumming’s labor theory of value, demonstrating why digital drum sample replacement was both essential and intolerable for the development of the prized blast beat, which was valued as concrete time, but measured as abstract time.
An Interlude examines how moral panics around backmasking let horror-inspired album introductions transmit different messages to insiders and outsiders. Chapter 3 reconstructs the digital-analog assemblage Morrisound Studios used to create the signature hyper-real performance associated with death metal and explores how its aural trace made the digital divide audible. Chapter 4 argues that the death metal production aesthetic undermined the groove-based forms of grindcore, examining how former grindcore bands re-record their own songs in a death metal idiom. Chapter 5 contests the notion that black metal was only a return to an imagined analog past, analyzing it as a post-digital style that used the devaluation of human performance it critiqued in death metal to incorporate influences from electronic dance music. The Postlude returns to the present and considers what is at stake when resistances are lost to remediation. (source: Uchicago.edu)

Abstract: “Hispanic Issues On Line (HIOL) is a refereed, open-access scholarly electronic series founded in 2006 and devoted to the study of Hispanic and Lusophone cultures. HIOL is stored at the University of Minnesota's Digital Conservancy as well as the LOCKSS system, which ensures preservation at worldwide research libraries.”
Source: https://cla.umn.edu/hispanic-issues/online-volumes