>>13762487
Not a music major, but I know a bit about music from my saxophone days.
Music can be decomposed many ways, but the fundamental way is:
>architecture
>decoration
It's almost like buildings. Noone has trouble telling a castle apart from a 5 star hotel despite both being classified as "big buildings".
That's because the "architecture", the fundamental bits that underline the overall structure are diferent from both.
A castle has walls, towers, maybe a moat and drawbridge, a central building, a courtyard.
An hotel will have noone of these but has a lot of windows for each room, a reception, public catering area.
The architecture of music follows a similar idea. Most genres of music have a set of charecteristics to it. They're usually related to how music was made in certain regions/time epochs. Tribals only had drums, so when you hear drums, you think "tribal music". But some evolved tribes also chanted with the drums. Native americans had long, nasaled sounds to go with it, while african tribes have short "WOOP WOOP" to go with it and you can tell them apart.
Pirate music in particular was played with simple instruments (don't know their english names) that most other genres of musics did not employ. That's because this sort of music were popular among sailors, bunkhouses and other people who were too poor for a piano/celo but had enough free time to pick up music.
Guitars and the like are more common in-land because they're mostly a solitary instrument: the guitarrist both sings and plays and frequently needs no other musicians, while "pirate music" was more of a social thing.
Then there's the rythm and lyrics. The lyrics of course deal with maritime themes and love songs are often about the girl you left at the shore. But it's the rhytm that defines it: the instruments themselves impose limitations on how fast you can play them (or how slow you can play them without it sounding like a cat dying). The instruments employed in "pirate music" often require fast-hopping between notes but they don't allow a full-rage of 3-4 scales like other more "sofisticated" intrusment, thus end up reusing the same few notes arranged in diferent fast-moving patterns.
It's this "hoppyness" that makes it sound "piraty". Jazz also has the chateristic of "hopping" quickly between notes and scales, but requires a wider range of notes available and breaks the "hopping" down with long screeching notes.
There's also slow, sad songs that again deal with marithime themes. Those are often vocal only and when they feature an instrument, it's usually a single one so that one may be left to it's own sadness by himself or to singulary transmit it to the listeners.
Also note simliarities between "Pirate Songs" with Irish one's, low-class british/spanish and in some cases, vikings (yeah they had bawdy songs too, not just the Poetic Eda).
That's mostly where those song came from. When people took those songs to the coast and to the ships, they played with the instruments they could get.
This changes slightly if you're listening to them live: you don't need to know anything about music, the smell of gunpowder, rum and the frequent cussing interwined with saber-rattling will immeditely clue you that yes, you might be surrounded by pirates.