Let me explain. There’s this online music player called Pandora, which is supposed to “read your mind” and play music that you would like. You start off by giving it the name of an artist or song that you like, and it will play things that it deems “similar.” The people behind Pandora analyzed a whole bunch of songs and assigned traits to them using a lot of pretentious musical terms, like “subtle syncopation” and “minor key harmonic tonalities”. (They call this the “Music Genome Project.”) The player uses these traits and builds a playlist of other songs or artists that share the same properties.
I’m sure that the system works well, but for some reason, I just don’t like most of the stuff it plays. I give it some of my favourites like Radiohead and Björk, and it just starts playing absolute crap. The common traits are definitely there, but I end up not really enjoying the playlist it generates.
It could be that I’m just picky, but I think the whole concept is fundamentally flawed. It’s very difficult to quantify the elements that make you like or dislike music. For example, you might like a particular song for its repetitive beat, but another song with a repetitive beat might drive you nuts. Pandora is a noble effort, and I’m sure many people will like it, but unfortunately it just doesn’t work for me.
