Reverse Music Searching and Pandora
Chris has been getting into Pandora lately which is a great thing. For those of you who are not familiar Pandora is a service that streams music based on a genre, similar artist, or similar song. It feeds off of what you like and and creates a personal music station from that, for free. Since the beginning it has been such a strong service. I like that you can access it from almost anywhere. I remember starting it up while I would study at the computer labs in Cheek Hall.
As cool as it has been over the years it is also frustrating. As a music junkie there has been something I have wanted to see ever since I read about how they go about organizing the music. The ability to search for music based on the musical attributes it uses to classify each song. Every single song is analyzed and broken down at its base parts. For example, when I plugged in the song “Lazy Eye” by the Silversun Pickups that you can see in the new video section on my sidebar it says that this song features; basic rock song structure, punk influences, subtle use of vocal harmony, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, and major key tonality. Those are just a few of the attributes given to just one song. Wikipedia has an unofficial list of the attributes here.
As great as it is to learn about new music based on artists and songs I like, it would be great to be able to choose and pick from those musical attributes to discover new and interesting music. There are a lot of patterns that come out in the music I enjoy and it would be fun to explore that. I imagine it would be a great tool educators in music across the country.
