Musical DNA
Blame Shawn Fanning. Accuse MySpace Music, GarageBand or the crazy German scientists who came up with the MP3 format in the first place. Point the finger at musicians everywhere that are posting great and horrible tunes from their studios and garages. They have each contributed to the overwhelming amount of music I can now access. But with great power comes great responsibility. Shame on the aforementioned guilty parties for giving us so much music without providing any tools by which to sort through the overabundance; to weed out the good from the bad.
Of course, the answer to this technological problem can be solved, fittingly, with more technology. The good folks at the Music Genome Project have compiled a massive database of music, each song coded according to hundreds of musical attributes or ‘genes’. The result is Pandora, a free online streaming music service that plays whatever you tell it to. Pandora also serves up new music you (hopefully) haven’t heard based the previous songs you told it to play. There have been services like this before, though hardly this comprehensive. And there will be many more of these sites popping up as software and sophisticated algorithms evolve.
Like regular genes, the musical genome project assumes that music can be distilled to a set of defining characteristics. Adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine become acoustic or electric instrumentation, major or minor key tonality, or the use of vocal harmony etc. This is supposed to free music from all its trivialities. As the music genome website claims: “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.”
For purists, I’m sure Pandora is seen as a way to get at music more authentically. No distracting album art or music videos. No press reviews, just sound. Unfortunately, the fan experience for music involves a lot more than just sound. We buy into artists because they sound good, but also because they represent a certain set of ideas and cultural beliefs that we see in ourselves. It may sound inauthentic to admit this but its not unrealistic. Whether it leads us to the Holy Grail of music authenticity or not, Pandora and services like it are going to induce interesting shifts in the way music gets discovered and ultimately, how music gets marketed.
My next post will feature a mini tour through some of the songs and sounds on Pandora.
Of course, the answer to this technological problem can be solved, fittingly, with more technology. The good folks at the Music Genome Project have compiled a massive database of music, each song coded according to hundreds of musical attributes or ‘genes’. The result is Pandora, a free online streaming music service that plays whatever you tell it to. Pandora also serves up new music you (hopefully) haven’t heard based the previous songs you told it to play. There have been services like this before, though hardly this comprehensive. And there will be many more of these sites popping up as software and sophisticated algorithms evolve.
Like regular genes, the musical genome project assumes that music can be distilled to a set of defining characteristics. Adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine become acoustic or electric instrumentation, major or minor key tonality, or the use of vocal harmony etc. This is supposed to free music from all its trivialities. As the music genome website claims: “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.”
For purists, I’m sure Pandora is seen as a way to get at music more authentically. No distracting album art or music videos. No press reviews, just sound. Unfortunately, the fan experience for music involves a lot more than just sound. We buy into artists because they sound good, but also because they represent a certain set of ideas and cultural beliefs that we see in ourselves. It may sound inauthentic to admit this but its not unrealistic. Whether it leads us to the Holy Grail of music authenticity or not, Pandora and services like it are going to induce interesting shifts in the way music gets discovered and ultimately, how music gets marketed.
My next post will feature a mini tour through some of the songs and sounds on Pandora.
posted by wade at 9:35 PM
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