Pandora
In short, this is about Pandora, an amazing web application that functions as a jukebox, selecting music based on an artist or song that you specify. It's incredible and I don't want my long winded entry to prevent you from trying it out.
Now, for the long version:
I've always wondered what connects musical taste - what is it about sound that sends us in one direction or the other? I remember my first Björk concert at the Palladium in Hollywood. I was looking at the crowd and trying to imagine what, besided Björk tied us together. I saw a guy with a Massive Attack Blue Lines t-shirt and almost feinted; in my entire sojourn at Biola I hadn't met anyone that had even heard a Massive Attack song. After a few years of being around that urban/electro/indie mentallity, it is no surprise, but at that point I felt something special: this guy, whoever he is, understands.
Now what at first was a mystery and after that a hypothesis is made concrete by Pandora, a piece of software that chooses a playlist based on either an artist or song as an origination point. After running into it on Friday night I've become an instant junkie. Beyond my own excitement the site has withstood the true test - everyone I've pointed to it has been surprised and pleasured by it.
I was describing the site to a friend tonight and he immediately became skeptical and his questions made me realize just how remarkable the conceptual design is behind Pandora and how it demonstrates that computers can think for us if we work hard enough at telling them how.
His first skeptical assertion was that Pandora may encourage a lack of diversity in musical experience. If it picks artists like the one you specify, doesn't that leave you in this tiny little box listening to things that always sound the same? His second question was whether Pandora made its selections based on what other people picked. Weren't you handing your thinking over to other people?
The way Pandora branches it's selections is based on attributes of music - some 400 or so that musicologists ascribe to the tunes. I'm beyond my depth at exact definitions but some of those attributes are things like vocalization, tempo, and chord structure. I started a channel based on Björk and find myself listening to Goldfrapp because of, the software tells me:
"... electronica influences, mild rythmic syncopation, repetitive melodic phrasing, extensive vamping and synthetic sonority."
But as soon as the Goldfrapp track is finished I find myself listening to Ben Graves who is selected because of:
"... mellow rock instrumentation, jazz influences, mild rythmic syncopation, demanding instrumental part writing and major key tonality."
So it's a sort of musical six degrees of separation. A few connections later, you find yourself listening to something you may or may not have ever expected. The software does get this wrong - I was dished a Celine Dion song a few songs after picking Natacha Atlas as my starting point - but it's easy to skip a bad selection and give it a thumb down meaning you'd like not to see it come back again.
When my friend spoke of my handing the thinking over to "someone else" I first recoiled; no, other people were not making the decisions... but as I thought about it, the software was. Most of the time I find any "intelligent" software encumbering and easily tricked, but in this case I found myself enjoying the prospect of allowing it to find connections and play me something I hadn't heard. I think the reasons I found myself enjoying a piece of software picking my playlist was because the attributes of the music were so well distinguished initially, the problem space was small (it just picks one song after the other), and because I could give feedback (skipping songs and telling it whether or not I liked them).
I don't think Pandora is going to replace my own thinking about music, and I know it could never supplant the excellent DJs on stations like KCRW or KEXP. It gives us a new mechanism to experience music, and does an exceptionally good job at it. Now instead of thinking of artists we like on their own, we can think in terms of "Suzanne Vega --> Eddie Brickel --> Sinead O'Connor" or "Bjork --> Goldfrapp --> Baxter."
9:12:55 PM 
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