English
10 August 2009
No, I’m not writing about the box. Pandora is an Internet radio station that plays only music that you should like, based on your music profile. Though it is not necessary to sign up to try the station, it is necessary if you want your stations to be saved and usable from more than one computer. It is free to register.
Pandora is billed as putting the Music Genome Project into the hands of listeners. This project aims at creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.
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.
From what little I’ve used the station, I already am amazed at how accurate the project can match the listener’s style. Users create a station by selecting an artist or song. Based on the many attributes of the song, Pandora can find other songs. For variety, the user can add more seeds (artists or songs around which related music is based) to the current station, or add a new station.
Pandora also has a number of stations based on genre only (such as ‘Chamber, Baroque Period’ or ‘Instrumental Folk’). Users can also share stations with others, who can then make copies and take over the personalization.
Note that to use the station for free, users are limited to forty hours per month—so don’t rely on Pandora for all your listening!
14 August 2009
Dear Micah,
Thanks for the tip about Pandora. I discovered it from your blog a day or two ago. It is wonderful for orchestral music, but when I put a hymn title it let me pick a nice instrumental by the London Philharmonic and then a barrage of CCM. After the first I gave a thumbs down to about eight straight songs. Finally it told me I had reached my quota of ‘thumbs down’ votes for the day.
I’ll stick with Vivaldi, Bach and Handel for now. It’s nice to have on while I work. Thanks for the tip.
14 August 2009
Hello, Mr Gormley.
I suppose that once you’ve trained the station well enough with early classical music you could introduce some hymns back in there.
In addition, it’s good to create several stations—I have ‘early classical’, ‘late classical’, ‘folk’ and ‘relaxing’ stations, which I train with different song seeds.
I suggest you start a station with the artist Brian Crain. Tell me how you like it!
15 August 2009
Micah,
Thanks for the suggestion. I like the Brian Crain very much. I’ll have to keep working on the hymns.
16 October 2009
If you create more than one station on Pandora, you can switch in between them if you’re getting a song you don’t like—even if you’ve reached your quota for skipped songs.
By the way, there is a free app you can download from the iTunes Store so you can listen to Pandora on the iPhone and iPod touch, anywhere you have Internet access.