A friend just turned me on to Pandora, a nifty free “music discovery service” that streams songs based on your preferences. How it works is you enter an artist as a starting point. If Pandora has the rights to them, your new “radio station” will play one of their songs. After that it tries to play songs by artists that have similar qualities based on the profiles in the Music Genome Project’s extensive database. For every track played, you can click on the album art and choose thumbs up, “I like it,” or thumbs down, “I don’t like it.” If you choose the latter the song cuts off and a new one starts. In this way Pandora tailors a play list to what you like. And it’ll probably be sooner rather than later that an aritst you’ve never heard of crops up.
It’s kind of funny because for any given track you can click on, “Why did you play this song?” and it will give you an explanation. For example, on Neu!’s “Negativland” it says, “Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features electric rock instrumentation, electronica influences, mild rhythmic syncopation, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, and extended vamping.” Who knew?
I’ve seen that “extended vamping” comment quite a few times and admit I had no idea what it meant until I looked it up. The FAQ says,
‘Vamping’ is a term that refers to extended improvisation over a repeated chord change. One of the quintessetial examples of vamping is the outro to Freebird by Lynrd Skynrd, featuring a 5-minute epic guitar solo over some repeated chords.
So there I learned a new descriptive term. Maybe I’ll work it into a review sometime and make it sound like I know what I’m talking about.
Apparently Pandora is only supposed to be available to U.S. citizens because of licensing restrictions. You are required to enter a zip code when you sign up for an account. If you live in another country and want to try it, I don’t see what harm there’d be in saying that you live Georgia and your zip code is 30016…
If you do sign up, please leave your radio station address in the comments section or email it to us so we can check it out. If you’d like, you can give mine a listen too: X-Ray Dash Radio.
Yeah, pandora’s great. Now if I can just get Radio Nobody (http://www.pandora.com/?sc=sh16589266) to stop playing Journey, I’ll be set!
[...] Saxon Shores – Luck Will Not Save Us From A Jackpot Of Nothing (2005) This one is a Pandora discovery. Despite its bitter sounding title, plenty of hope rings through these five tranquil, atmospheric instrumental songs. They feel both naturalistic and futuristic, like maybe watching the sun rise over the smooth glass surface of a lake surrounded by mountains, thankful to have survived the alien invasion. [...]
[...] My buddy Scott had written about Pandora over at Candied Pop almost a month ago and I finally got around to playing with it. You provide it with an artist or a song and it will construct a playlist of tracks that it “thinks” are similar to your initial request based on a wide number of parameters but all grounded in the musical construction of the song. For example, I typed in DJ Shadow and so far Pandora has returned Ming & FS, Duuster, and Total Science stating that the commonality between them is the use of Modal Harmonies, Synth Riffs, and prevalence of groove. Yes, the “prevalence of groove”. It does this by drawing upon the knowledge built into the Music Genome Project, which cataloged the “genes” of a song into discrete components: “everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony.” [...]