Oh, oh, oh. Here’s a nice new distraction for me. I’m taking a brief break in my ridiculous Monday schedule to point out the cool service at pandora.com. It’s internet radio. It’s song advice. It’s music supervision in a nifty web app. Just type in an artist or a song that you like and it begins a music stream tailored to your tastes. you can vote up or down on the songs they play. The stream adjusts accordingly. I’d heard about the Music Genome Project on NPR once and then kinda forgot about what they do. From the Pandora website:
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.
Since I’m going to go see Laura Veirs tomorrow night at Spaceland, I enter her name. Pandora begins with one of her songs. So far it’s gone on to play Slumber Party, Stereolab, Jann Arden, Rainer Maria and Ivy. I can’t wait to play with this some more.
