There are countless Internet radio stations and music services that will make recommendations based on the music you like. But they all seem to take a pretty blunt approach. ("Oh, I see that you played Pennywise. Perhaps you'd like to hear some MxPx or Bad Religion?"). Then I stumbled onto Pandora. And this one's smart. You seed it with a few groups or artists that you like, and it does the rest. The results are frighteningly accurate, and no matter how much of a music nut you are, it will find some truly obscure artists that you're bound to like.
I've been trying to expand my chill-out music library (I need something to play when I try to recreate some of Shag's scenes in my living room), so I told Pandora I already own some Massive Attack and Thievery Corporation. It dutifully cued up a nice loung-y remix "Channel Zero" by Eric Pierre. There's a menu item next to each song that begs to be clicked -- "Why is this song playing?" Like everything else about this site, it answered unobtrusively and matter-of-factly: "We're palying this track because it features a laid back female vocal, abmiguous lyrics, the heavy use of chordal patterning and use of electric pianos." Fair enough.
Turns out the recommendations are driven by the Music Genome Project, in which "a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever." They "ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or 'genes' into a very large Music Genome...everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of coursre the rich world of singing and volcal harmony."
And I thought I was being obsessive when I finally alphebetized by CD collection.
