Pandora's Box

I've been toying with Pandora again. Now that it's been out a couple years (that's decades in Internet time), I thought I'd revisit it.

Pandora categorizes songs internally by their "genes" or features, and when you tell it what songs or artists you like Pandora presents songs that have the same genes. What brought me back to Pandora was the difficulty of finding music in a specific genre, and also describing music. When someone asks what kind of music you like, how do you answer?

Pandora has a feature that helps me answer that question. When you click on the name of a song, Pandora displays information on that song, including some of its primary music genes. For instance, "Gypsy" by Kan'Nal has these genes:

basic rock song structures
mystical qualities
folk influences
a subtle use of vocal harmony
mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation
major key tonality
groove based composition
acoustic rhythm guitars
prominent percussion

I took several songs that I liked and came up with some of my favorite qualities using these features:

minor key tonality
mystical qualities
an improvisational approach
middle eastern influences
traditional afro-latin roots
latin influences
folk influences
blues influences
a subtle use of vocal harmony
mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation
groove based composition
acoustic rhythm guitars
solo strings
prominent percussion

So now you know what kind of music I like. Might still make more sense just to say I like edgy jazz, bluegrass, classical, middle eastern, latin, alternate 80's rock, folk and instrumental music with a good beat and the use of violin, saxophone, harmonica or hot piano.


Posted by Dave    Blog Tag: Chatter