Planning- Research on Genre

Soul

Soul is a popular music genre that originated in the United States in the 1950s and early 1960s. It combines elements of African-American gospel music, rhythm and blues and jazz. Soul music became popular for dancing and listening in the United States.

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.

Soul has been a major influence on British popular music since the 1960s including bands of the British Invasion, most significantly The Beatles. There were a handful of significant British Blue-eyed soul acts, including Dusty Springfield and Tom Jones. American soul was extremely popular among some youth sub-cultures like the Northern soul and Modern soul movements, but a clear genre of British soul did not emerge until the 1980s when a number of artists including George Michael, Sade, Simply Red, Lisa Stansfield and Soul II Soul enjoyed commercial success

Electro

Records in the genre typically feature drum machines and heavy electronic sounds, usually without vocals, although if vocals are present they are delivered in a deadpan manner, often through electronic distortion such as vocoding and talkboxing. This is the main distinction between electro and previously prominent genres such as disco, in which the electronic sound was only part of the instrumentation.

New branches of electro have risen over the last couple of years. Florida has pioneered the "Electrocore" sound, started in the late 1990s by artists like Jackal & Hyde and Dynamix II and carried on to this day.

Electro Soul

It’s a sub-genre that is hard to label, hard to pinpoint the sound. It doesn’t receive a ton of mainstream attention, either. Yet, it carries a legion of dedicated fans.

With influences of classic rock, blues, hip-hop, soul, funk, disco and more, all intricately laced with thudding bass lines and cutting synths, ‘electro-soul’ represents a medium in which the old and new collide.

Today, electro-soul encompasses many artists. Forming out of the current EDM scene, it’s a sub-genre that uses the power and intensity of modern dance music with the emotional vibes and antiquated samples of previous musical genres. The “father” of this new genre is without a doubt, Derek Vincent Smith, better known as Pretty Lights.