Friday, March 25, 2011

An Interesting Concept


The Music Genome Project. If you are not familiar with that phrase you probably have never listened to Pandora Internet radio. I can't imagine that this has been around since 1999 and I had never heard of it. Wikipedia can explain it a lot better than I can, and if you follow the link and read it you will know what I know.
-
What I can tell you is that when you break down a song into musical components (or GENES,) the practical application is that you can essentially predict what music a person may like based on songs and artists who have similiar components.
-
I just find the whole concept really cool. I enjoy Pandora, though I find myself flicking between my personal "stations" a lot. I have a Dean Martin station, a Willie/Waylon/Merle Haggard station, a Ditty Bop station, a Donovan station and a Van Morrison station for starters. And something I named "Summer Breeze" just because I wanted to hear that song. It led me to a bunch of forgotten old 70's songs that I remember playing on jukeboxes as a kid when I went out with my parents and they gave me money to get rid of me for a bit so they could enjoy a few beers and eat dinner. But the cool thing is that "similar" styles expose me to both new artists, and what we used to call "deeper" album cuts (way back when.) I find that the Beatles show up a lot. But also groups I forgot about like FireFall, and old Eric Clapton and Cream.... and Joe Cocker. None of which I have in any collection of my own.
-
There really is no need for me to keep all the old albums I have in crates downstairs. It's too easy to just pick a song and Pandora will play it. But...I probably won't get rid of them yet. Maybe someday I'll have a music room again. Buy those "album cover frames" you see in stores. Put them up for nostalgia's sake when I'm old. I may as well pick up a Victrola while I can, too. Sheesh. There's an analogy here somewhere.
-
And it occurs to me that I used to sit behind a microphone and spin records. It also occurs to me that I remember calling radio stations to ask to hear a song and then taping them on a cassette deck instead of buying them.
-
What's next? A computer chip with all the music ever made implanted into my brain? Then all I have to do is think of a song.... and there it is...

No comments: