I was just listening to the latest podcast (the 6th actually) of “Inside the Net” by Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur where they featured Tim Westergren of Pandora Media.
Tim started out the Music Genome project almost 6 years ago:
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.
Over the past 5 years, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 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.
The project now resulted into Pandora Media. Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help you find and enjoy music that you’ll love. It’s powered by the Music Genome Project, the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken. “Just tell us one of your favorite songs or artists and we’ll launch a streaming station to explore that part of the music universe”.
I’m never going to pay full price for a game again, flash cards for the win!
I am a Neuroscience Researcher. Presently we are working on String Theory. Please send me all of the data you have about this technology. We are building something incredible in our lab, and this technology seems to fit.
R. Reeves
Researcher
Albert Einstein Healthcare Network
Phila Penna, 19151