Audio & Educational Technology

I believe that a discussion about musical “style” would be incomplete without at least a mention of Pandora.  Pandora comes to us as a result of the Music Genome Project, by Tim Westergren.   Pandora comes to us as a result of musical analysis of “tens of thousands” of artists.  As Tim describes it, they 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.”

Tim goes to describe how their team attempted to describe music according to unique “attributes” that they call “genes”.

“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.”

Professor Pennycook & I were discussing the mechanism they likely used to do this, which almost certainly involves meta-data rather than musical pattern-matching.   Pandora lets users create stations based on their favorite songs or artists, and will deliver songs/artists that match the attributes of the artist/song used to create the station.  You can also vote in favor of the selection played or against it.  In this way, you can “train” Pandora to match the songs that you think the station should play.  Pandora will actually send you an email reminding you to do this periodically.  One quesiton we had is whether our votes influenced the way the database tags the music.  One thing that we found curious was why in some cases when we created a station, the first song that plays is often not by the artist for which the station was named.  This happened with Dr. Pennycook with Mahler and with me when creating a station for Beethoven.

In any case, Pandora has clearly been designed around a taxonomy of musical attributes that are, at least, populated by its creators.  My question is–does this taxonomy also imply a “folksonomy” (re: Thomas Vanderwal)?

Does this represent “generative music”?  No–but perhaps it’s another step in a direction to consider what it means to adapt to listener “style”.  I use Pandora regularly, and think it’s tres cool.  Frankly, I’ve heard some people describe it as a ‘killer app’‘.  This is debatable, but I do know that Pandora & their “musical genome project” is significant in that it’s the closest app that I’ve found that tries to give me my tunes, my way.