Pandora

Thanks to my office-mate Emily, I've found something called Pandora Internet Radio, and it's one of the coolest internet radio stations I've ever seen (with all due respect to KEXP). It's built on the concept of letting the user program their own music stream. The premise is quite simple: you pick songs and artists you like and the website constructs a playlist for you based on those preferences. Because of copyright laws, you can't tell it to play specific songs, but the website has an ingenious way of taking your preferences and turning them into a continuous audio stream. What makes it interesting is that the playlist is based on specific characteristics of individual songs determined by a team of people who listen to music all day and describe each song they hear based on certain characteristics like "major key tonality," "mix of electric and acoustic instrumentation," and (my personal favorite) "extensive vamping." These characteristics, rather than arbitrary assumptions about which bands are similar, or which musicians influenced other ones, are used to program your personal station. They've even given their efforts to describe and interrelate the songs the highfalutin' name the Music Genome Project. From the pictures on their blog of headphone-wearing people hunched over computers, the Music Genome Sweatshop might be a better name, but I can't dispute the results.

To start playing music, you pick a song or band to seed the station, and then the website picks songs that match the characteristics of your seed from its database. You can train the station by clicking little "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down" buttons on the player to rate a particular song. You can also add a song or artist to a station you've already created to expand its repertoire. Each individual station keeps separate track of the song qualities you prefer, and you can customize up to 100 stations.

It's been fun coming up with different bands and combinations, and after about a week and a half of listening I have a couple stations that are pretty well tuned where the "thumbs-down" songs have become increasingly rare. Here are some "seed" bands I've had good luck with so far, along with other bands I added to the station once I'd created it: Joy Division (augmented by Wire, Gang of Four, and Bauhaus for a post-punk extravaganza), Iron Maiden (a band that needs no augmentation), John Coltrane (with Ornette Coleman to make a skwonky saxophone paradise), and Eric B & Rakim (for all the old-skool jams). Not everything has worked out so well, however. David Bowie Radio took a lot of training before figuring out that I didn't want to hear anything off of Let's Dance, and Hawkwind (German space rock from the 70's) Radio has an unfortunate predilection for 80's hair metal like Sammy Hagar and Loverboy.

One of the big pluses has been discovering new music. The website's founders take a particular interest in exposing listeners to music they might not have heard before, so every few songs will be from a less well-known band. Granted, some of the obscure stuff I've heard is probably obscure for a reason, but it's definitely been a way to learn about different bands. For example, Iced Earth is a newer band that writes classic 80's metal with crunching riffs and high-pitched vocals on songs about topics like the signing about the Declaration of Independence. A perfect musical accompaniment to your barbecue on Tuesday. Happy listening!