In an earlier post, Bryan lauded the greatness of Pandora and the never ending amounts of new music one can be turned on to. So I bit. I tried out Pandora, since my patience was wearing thin with XM and it’s never ending streak of failures in my eyes. I’m now officially hooked. Pandora is indeed great, and makes my time at work seem to drag on just a bit faster than it had before Pandora entered my life. So I looked into Pandora a little more, and I kept seeing the words Music Genome Project everywhere I look. What exactly is this Music Genome Project they keep bragging about?
On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of 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.
Since we started back in 2000, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of tens of thousands of different artists - ranging from popular to obscure - and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.
It has been quite an adventure, you could say a little crazy - but now that we’ve created this extraordinary collection of music analysis, we think we can help be your guide as you explore your favorite parts of the music universe.
We hope you enjoy the journey.
Tim Westergren
Founder
The Music Genome Project
Hey! What a novel idea! Listening to music that I like! None of this crap shoveled at me by mass media. (Gotta love Brittney, Paris, emo bands, et.al.) All I have to do is type in a song or artist, and Pandora throws up a play list of the music I should or (more often than not) do like. But how does Pandora know what songs I’ll like? The FAQ over at Pandora explains everything quite well, but I’ll toss in a snippet as well, just for fun…
Q: How many songs do you have in your collection?
There are well over half a million analyzed songs, and counting…
Q: How long does it take to analyze a track? How many songs do you add to the collection in a month?
It takes most of our seasoned analysts about 20 minutes to analyze a single track. Pop singles takes less time, than say, many jazz tracks do. Some songs can take well over 30 minutes to analyze.
We add over 15,000 analyzed tracks to the Music Genome a month!
Q: How many attributes or “genes” are there in the Music Genome?
There are just shy of 400 musical attributes in the Music Genome Project.
When you ask the Pandora Tuner “why is this song playing?” what gets displayed is just a summary of the information used by the Music Genome.
Even two songs that show identical answers to “why is this song playing?” still have countless differences that the Music Genome uses when it matches music based on each of those songs.
These attribute summaries are just intended to provide some interesting insight into the musicological elements of a song — without getting into dozens of individual attributes for each element.
And there you go. The technology behind the technology is a band of music lovers (granted, far more talented and better trained) much like ourselves that pour over every song they encounter. Despite all the amazing advancements in the world of science and technology, when it comes to music, nothing beats the good old human ear.
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March 18th, 2009 at 11:33 am
Pandora has best knowledge about music…
March 18th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
I stumbled upon Pandora about a year ago and since then I’ve listened to it nearly every single day. I’ve discovered bands I now LOVE that before I hadn’t even heard of, and I’m addicted! I cant imagine music without Pandora anymore.
Although I am a little sad I cant share it with my international friends yet…
March 19th, 2009 at 7:45 pm
Pandora?????
March 22nd, 2009 at 4:28 pm
If You are not using Pandora, then you are missing out for Pandora Rocks.
March 29th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
Pandora is awesome. It revolutionized music hearing experience with its innovative idea and bringing internet and music more together. Cool…
April 5th, 2009 at 10:21 am
Way cool. Revolutionary, no joke. This AI has really been a pleasant surprise, and the adventure continues.
May 13th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
The brilliance of Pandora is how they’ve created a way to match music together based on very specific musical characteristics. Love their product!
July 26th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Need this on my LG Voyager touch.
Wow
December 29th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
what station is good for my samsun memor