Musicology

I've been a Pandora fan for a while. Pandora lets you create your own radio stations based on a few songs you like, and then plays ones that it thinks you will like. Today I have a station called "Folky Females" that Dara refers to as "angry chick music". I have one called "Keith's Choice" based on some recommendations from Keith once, not to mention "Dara's Manly Country". I don't know anything about classical music, but Pandora does. The magic behind Pandora is the Music Genome Project, and it was the subject of a NYTimes Magazine article last week.

Some elements that these musicologists (who, really, are musicians with day jobs) codify are technical, like beats per minute, or the presence of parallel octaves or block chords. Someone taking apart Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” documents the prevalence of harmony, chordal patterning, swung 16ths and the like. But their analysis goes beyond such objectively observable metrics. To what extent, on a scale of 1 to 5, does melody dominate the composition of “Hey Jude”? How “joyful” are the lyrics? How much does the music reflect a gospel influence? And how “busy” is Stan Getz’s solo in his recording of “These Foolish Things”? How emotional? How “motion-inducing”? On the continuum of accessible to avant-garde, where does this particular Getz recording fall?

The article talks to the analytical model used by Pandora in comparison to the "social" model used by almost everyone else for their "if you like this, you might like this" approach based on user recommendations.

Westergren maintains “a personal aversion” to collaborative filtering or anything like it. “It’s still a popularity contest,” he complains, meaning that for any song to get recommended on a socially driven site, it has to be somewhat known already, by your friends or by other consumers. Westergren is similarly unimpressed by hipster blogs or other theoretically grass-roots influencers of musical taste, for their tendency to turn on artists who commit the crime of being too popular; in his view that’s just snobbery, based on social jockeying that has nothing to do with music. In various conversations, he defended Coldplay and Rob Thomas, among others, as victims of cool-taste prejudice.

One word: Britney!!!

Pandora is pretty much all I listen to, unless it's news on the radio or I'm tethered to an iPod. That our stereo-replacement worked with Pandora was a major reason I bought it. I've discovered some terrific artists thanks to its recommendations (like Patty Griffen we saw in concert this summer). If you have a broadband connection, check it out.