Kaptain Krayola

Recently the Kaptain, in his never ending search for free sources of music, stumbled upon pandora.com. Pandora.com is an internet radio type site that lets you put in a band or song you like then finds other songs it thinks you’ll like and plays them. It also gives you the ability to give a song the thumbs up or thumbs down to help it learn what you like.

Pandora is part of the Music Genome Project which the Kaptain had never heard of before but is also quite an interesting concept.



What Wikipedia says about the Music Genome Project:

The Music Genome Project, created in January 2000, is an effort founded by Will Glaser, Jon Kraft, and Tim Westergren to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level” using over 400 attributes to describe songs and a complex mathematical algorithm to organize them.

A given song is represented by a vector containing approximately 150 genes. Each gene corresponds to a characteristic of the music, for example, gender of lead vocalist, level of distortion on the electric guitar, type of background vocals, etc. Rock and pop songs have 150 genes, rap songs have 350, and jazz songs have approximately 400. Other genres of music, such as world and classical, have 300-500 genes. The system depends on a sufficient number of genes to render useful results. Each gene is assigned a number between 1 and 5, and fractional values are allowed but are limited to half integers. (The term genome is borrowed from genetics.)

Given the vector of one or more songs, a list of other similar songs is constructed using a distance function.

To create a song’s genome, it is analyzed by a musician in a process that takes 20 to 30 minutes per song. Ten percent of songs are analyzed by more than one technician to ensure conformity with the standards, i.e., reliability.

The Kaptain has been using it for a week and he’s got to say it’s pretty good at picking music that he likes. Every so often it will play something outside of the normal routine but we can only guess it’s to keep branching out for new music you might like.

It’s worth a look if you like listening to music and don’t feel like pirating all those MP3s.