Caracterizacion computacional del genero musical salsa.

Music exists since the beginning of human evolution and it has been an intrinsic part of his culture [1]. It can be defined as a set of organised sounds in a particular way. The more a set of sounds is listened the more familiar it becomes to the ear. When certain/particular kind of sounds becomes familiar people decide what music sounds good and then they put similar music into categories of styles. Similar styles can be contained into a bigger category called genre [2]. a well-known genre in our region and part of our cultural identity is Salsa [3]. Its origin dates back to the 30’s and since then this genre have been modified by different artists around the world with a different vision of the genre, adding new musical instruments and new technology to the music [4]. Despite the increasingly popularity of this genre and its trajectory of many years as a musical genre, Salsa has not been computationally analysed in order to know which are the acoustic components that define it and make it different from other musical genres. This project is then the first step towards a computational analysis of one of the most important cultural components of our region. The goals of this project are: (1) to create a big knowledge database of Salsa music, (2) to create a software with the purpose of extracting acoustic information of Salsa music, and (3) to model the musical information using advance artificial intelligence techniques in order to analyse the characteristics and evolution of the genre. In addition, this project will contribute to expand the knowledge of computer music as well as to help the legitimation of the Salsa genre as a cultural representation of our region