The Music Genome Project

One of the results of the M.G. Project is an online music player called Pandora. You can use it for free and it's actually pretty fun to play with. About 40 people work full time describing about 400 attributes for each song that are analysed. At first I thought that this approach is totally overkill and it properly is. But it's funny to see what criteria's the genome project uses to pick new music for you. And there is some pretty cool stuff in there..

1. It's easy to get started, you don't need to register.
2. Just type in a song and Pandora starts playing.
3. Pandora will throw in other songs that sound like the one you choose.
4. When you tell Pandora weather you like the song or not, or if you add more songs Pandora will change its criteria's for selecting new music for you.

Go Play.

From the genome projects web site:
"Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like. "

Martin Buhl