TheMadPeacock On The Sofa

So I have a week at home with my new baby and between feeds I am getting some time to sleep and catch up on some of my hobbies.

Music is something I love, I played violin as a kid, (I wanted to play electric guitar but my parents made me play violin; don’t know why) so my interest in playing died early.. but not my interest in music.

One of my challenges in life is finding new music I like, I don’t have time to stay up to date and as I follow several genres of music what I really need is someone to recommend new music to me. iTunes tries but it is a very weak system.

Pandora to the rescue! I just Stumbled onto Pandora, the free radio station that uses the music genome project to take one song or artist you name and create an entire radio station of similar music! Its amazing.

For us nurds who like to know how things work here is an extract from Wikipedia

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.[1] (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.

A nice feature of Pandora is that if the system picks a song you like but do not know or own you can directly purchase it from iTunes so you can play it when you are offline.

You can create as many “stations” as you like, I have a New Rock, Rap and Old Rock station so far and I am discovering new music all the time…

Thanks Pandora!