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November 18, 2005
The Music Genome Project
So my buddy Dan turned me on the music genome project. Basically a group of musicians have listened to the music of over 10,000 artists, broken down their music into components - melody, harmony and rhythm, instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and singing and vocal harmony. They refer to these components as genes, thus the music genome project.
Pandora groups music from the same gene pool, and presents it you. This gene pool is based on an initial selection you make. You can enter either a song or a band. In my case I selected Led Zeppelin, and Pandora fed me Hendrix, Motley Crue, Poison, Dio, and Ted Nugent. Each time Pandora feeds you a song, you can vote on whether you like the song or not. It uses these votes to further refine the list of music presented to you.
I have to be honest, I think it is crap. Poison and Motley Crue is in the same gene pool as Zeppelin? I don't think so. When I selected The Beatles, I got the Kinks, the Turtles, and some band I never heard of.
Here is the problem. Both bands (Zeppelin and Beatles) crossed a lot of different musical styles. So, when I say I like the Beatles - is it the yeah yeah yeah Beatles of 1963 or the Tomorrow Never Knows of 1966, or the come together, Beatles of 1969?
Now, lets look at another issue with Pandora. You can only enter a single band at a time. I cannot tell it that I like the beatles, pink floyd, led zeppelin, oasis, yes, neil young, queen, coldplay, metallica, etc. at one time, and then have it derive a list for me. I think most people are like me. They like music that crosses a fairly broad range of styles and types.
Finally the bigger issue is the whole idea of quantifying music into components. While I can appreciate that this was done by musicians, music is about feelings and emotion. I admit that I tend to like music with “changily guitars” as my friend Rob says (major chords), but as I stated earlier I like music from a broad range of styles.
So is there a solution. What I would like to see, is an application that would allow me to upload my itunes library file. The application would parse the songs, bands, genre, year, and ratings and upload those into a database. It would toss any songs that do not have a rating. It would then compare my entries, and ratings to those that other people have uploaded, and then present me with a potential list of songs that I would like. You would have to build in some rules for the matching process, but I think that this could give you the best choices. After all if I like bands A, B, and C, and you like bands A, B and D, there might be a good chance that I would like D and you would like C.
Anyway, give Pandora a look. You might like it, but I didn't it.
Posted by pmadsen at November 18, 2005 09:22 PM
