Acoustic Overspecification in Electronic Dance Music Taxonomy
About
Electronic Dance Music (EDM) classification typically relies on industry-defined taxonomies, with current supervised approaches naturally assuming the validity of prescribed subgenre labels. However, whether these commercial distinctions reflect genuine acoustic differences remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised approach to discover the natural acoustic structure of EDM independent of commercial labels. To address the historical lack of EDM-specific feature design in MIR, we systematically construct a tailored, interpretable acoustic feature space capturing the genre's defining production techniques, spectral textures, and layered rhythmic patterns. To ensure our findings reflect inherent acoustic structure rather than feature engineering artifacts, we validate our clustering against state-of-the-art pre-trained audio embeddings (MERT and CLAP). Across both our bespoke feature space and the pre-trained embeddings, clustering consistently identifies 20 or fewer natural acoustic families -- suggesting current commercial EDM taxonomy is acoustically overspecified by nearly one-half.