Pandora's Box

A friend of mine recently hipped me onto a web site/application called Pandora. If you’re like me you are always looking for new and interesting music, but often at not your exposure to new tunes comes randomly or by accident; i.e. you overhear a snippet of a song on the radio and try to find it on I-Tunes. Then an application like I-Tunes will offer you a listing of what other customers who purchased your particular song also purchased. It’s a neat way to expand your listening but it can be frustrating since the I-Tunes algorithm makes some bizarre picks sometimes.

This is where Pandora steps in. Pandora is the end application of something called the Music Genome Project. Somewhere in the vast world of the internet there are 50 people sitting in a room listening to every song that has ever been recorded. From the web-site: “The typical music analyst working on the Music Genome Project has a four-year degree in music theory, composition or performance, has passed through a selective screening process and has completed intensive training in the Music Genome's rigorous and precise methodology and procedures. To qualify for the work, analysts must have a firm grounding in music theory, including familiarity with a wide range of styles and sounds. All analysis is done on location.” While the analysts listen they are studying and collecting hundreds of musical details on every song including melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics and some 395 other attributes. When you input your favorite songs or artists into Pandora, the Genome Project scans its data base of analyzed music to find songs with interesting musical similarities to your choice. These are then arrayed in a radio station type playlist. After each song is played you vote either thumbs up or down and Pandora refines its search and picks the next song based on your input on the previous one. If it's not quite right you can tell it more and it will get better for you. The algorithm fine tunes itself with each choice and what you end up with is invariably music that you didn’t know about before but is pretty much to your tastes.

If nothing else Pandora is a good way to expand your music collection. Each song that is played also has a link to Amazon or I-Tunes so you can go purchase the title after listening to it. Give it a shot, its pretty freaky.