What is style

Style is something apart from substance.
Like flavor.
Traditional music notation is mostly obsolete with regards to modern music, where
the inflection and sounds are the defining characteristics.
One thousand musicians will likely play a written piece of music one thousand ways.
Style is how billions of humans differentiate themselves from one another.

Sometimes, style is the point.
Sometimes function and format are incidental, like the 12 bar blues.

The format is just there so you can forget about writing a format and get on with the
business of expression.

I will now liberally quote one of my favorite books of all time, The Manual: How to
Have a Number One the Easy Way, by Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, A.K.A.,
The KLF.

"We await the day with relish that somebody dares to make a dance
record that consists of nothing more than an electronically programmed
bass drum beat that continues playing the fours monotonously for eight
minutes. Then, when somebody else brings one out using exactly the
same bass drum sound and at the same beats per minute (B.P.M.),
we will all be able to tell which is the best, which inspires the dance floor
to fill the fastest, which has the most sex and the most soul. There is no
doubt, one will be better than the other. What we are basically saying is,
if youhave anything in you, anything unique, what others might term as
originality, it will come through whatever the component parts used in
your future Number One are made up from. "

This phenomenon is prevalent in the field of visual art as well. 

Figure 1.
TKS


Figure 2.








In this case, the artist has taken the source material, the three letters "TKS" and turned them into something unrecognizable, so that they have merit entirely independent from the source.

For example, this nine second drum solo: (1:42-1:51)

from an old soul/gospel record has been sampled, reworked and mutated across a slew of genres, in many cases leaving the original drum pattern totally unrecognizable.

Such as in this case:




I'm having a hard time putting this post in a tidy package. I think I need to learn a lot more about multimedia blogging before I can inflect it with any style of my own.