| Style | Description |
|---|
| Illbient | Illbient is a term coined by DJ Olive to describe the iconoclastic music being produced by a community of artists based in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York in the early 1990s. |
| Impressionist music | Musical Impressionism occurred as a reaction to the excesses of the Romantic era. While the Romantic era was characterized by a dramatic use of the major and minor scale system, Impressionist music tends to make more use of dissonance and more uncommon scales such as the whole tone scale. Romantic composers also used long forms of music such as the symphony and concerto, while Impressionist composers favored short forms such as the nocturne, arabesque, and prelude. |
| Incidental music | Incidental music is music in a play, television program, radio program, video game or some other form not primarily musical. The term is less frequently applied to film music, with such music being referred to instead as the "film score" or "soundtrack". |
| Indietronica | Electronic dance music is a broad set of percussive music genres that largely inherit from 1970s disco music and, to some extent, the experimental pop music of Kraftwerk. |
| Indie rock | Indie rock is a supposed genre of alternative rock that primarily exists in the independent underground music scene. |
| Indie pop | Indie pop is a genre of alternative rock music that originated in the United Kingdom in the mid '80s, with its roots in the Scottish post-punk bands on the Postcard Records label in the early '80s such as Orange Juice and Josef K and the dominant UK independent band of the mid eighties, The Smiths. |
| Indo jazz | Indo jazz is a hybrid musical genre consisting of jazz, classical and indian influences. The structure and patterns would be based on indian music with the improvisation typical to jazz overlaid. |
| Industrial music | Industrial music is a loose term for a number of different styles of experimental music, especially but not necessarily electronic music. |
| Industrial musical | An industrial musical is a musical performed for the employees of a business, intended to create a feeling of being part of a team, and/or to educate and motivate the management and salespeople to improve sales and profit. It is a form of public relations and advertising that can be used internally within a business. |
| Industrial metal | Industrial metal is a musical genre that draws elements from industrial rock and heavy metal music. |
| Industrial rock | Industrial Rock is a musical genre that fuses Industrial Music and specific Rock subgenres such as Punk, Oi!, Hardcore and later on Hard Rock. Industrial Rock spawned Industrial Metal and is frequently confused with the latter. |
| Instrumental rock | Instrumental rock and roll is a type of rock and roll music which emphasises musical instruments, and which features no or very little singing. |
| Intelligent dance music | Intelligent dance music (commonly IDM) is a genre name invented by Alan Parry to describe dance music of the 1980s and early 1990s which uses unusual and "weird" sounds, defies rhythmic convention, and is much harder to dance to than most forms of techno. |
| Inuit music | Traditional Inuit music has been based around drums used in dance music as far back as can be known, and a vocal style called katajjaq (Inuit throat singing) has become of interest in Canada and abroad. |
| Irish traditional music | Irish traditional music (also "Irish trad", "Irish folk music", and other variants) is the generic term for music that has been created in various genres on the entire island of Ireland, North and South of the Border. |
| Iscathamiya | Isicathamiya (with the 'c' pronounced as a dental click) is an a cappella singing style that originated from the South African Zulus. |
| Isolationist ambient music | Also known as isolationism. The term was popularized in the mid-1990s by the British magazine The Wire and the Ambient 4: Isolationism compilation from Virgin, this began as more or less a synonym for ambient industrial, but also inclusive of certain post-techno streams of ambient, such as Autechre and Aphex Twin. |
| Italo Disco | Italo disco is a very wide term that refers to various types of European disco and pop-styled dance music, that evolved during the early 1980s in Italy, Germany, Spain and other parts of Europe. |
| Itsmeños | folk music of the Zapotecs of Mexico |
| Izvorna Bosanska muzika | modernized folk music from Drina, Bosnia |
