Pandora’s Box

Yet another thing worth posting about today is Pandora.

While legend has it that last time Pandora opened her box, bad things came out – this time it’s not so bad. Pandora is part of the Music Genome Project started in 2000. It’s a web application written with the intent of “helping you find the music you like”. Example. I like David Crowder. So I enter it as an artist I like. Pandora knows things about David’s music style and lyrics and searches its database for similar music. It starts playing songs for you – you tell it yes you like it or no you don’t. You can also ask it questions like “why is this song playing?” and it will tell you why it thought you would like said song. After a while it learns from the music you voted on what you want to hear.

Why I think it’s cool – you don’t need to drag your whole CD collection with you, you get to hear new music, you don’t have to waste hard drive space either since Pandora has so much already on it.

I’m on day 3 of training it to know what I like and it’s getting really good!

Try it!!

PS – more on the music Genome Project – it’s cool!
The Music Genome Project

On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like.

Over the past 6 years, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists – ranging from popular to obscure – and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.

It has been quite an adventure, you could say a little crazy – but now that we’ve created this extraordinary collection of music analysis, we think we can help be your guide as you explore your favorite parts of the music universe.

We hope you enjoy the journey.