My wife starting humming along with music coming from my laptop. I didn’t recognize the piece so I clicked open the Pandora tab to see what was playing. Ah, the prelude from La Traviata. Not something I normally listen to it is, obviously, part of Jennifer’s musical world. It is due to Pandora that I’m listening to the piece.
Pandora (and last.fm) are “internet radio stations.” These sites ask you to specify a recording, or an artist, or a genre and they sprout a playlist from that seed. Like radio you don’t know what is coming next, you do know generally what type of music it will be. You can specify multiple artists or pieces to broaden or narrow the range of music that will be played. The pieces are chosen by their “musical DNA” as defined by the music genome project (see also wikipedia entry) this DNA has over 400 attributes. By default Pandora saves your selection as a “station.” These can be shared. You can view, and listen to, my stations here.
I use Pandora to explore music. Today’s selections are chosen from the seed Charles Gounod who I heard about while looking into the background of Funeral March of a Marionette which you may recognize, as I did, as the theme song from Alfred Hitchcock Presents, or see Hulu to view a few episodes. The meandering also lead to this wonderful animation.
Pandora is good for meandering and exploring. Specify an example, or a few, and a stream of music with similar attributes follows. A couple of weeks ago we needed a quiet Sunday morning and Gregorian Chants fit nicely. When I read a reference to Dengue Fever Pandora played a sample of their stuff and then lead me through a warren of similar pieces. If you don’t like a piece you can give it a Thumbs Down rating. If you like it a lot there’s a handy link to go buy now, or just Thumbs Up it so more of similar stuff is pulled into the stream. In either case a new piece will be playing in a few minutes.
It’s not so good for concentrated listening. (what do I mean by that?) You can’t, as far as I can tell, listen to an entire symphony. There is no guarantee that your seed artist will come up soon, or at all, in the resulting stream. You can’t replay a piece that has gone by. Your controls are volume, stop/pause and skip.
If you are not a control freak and can set yourself adrift, Pandora provides an easy way to meander through music linked by common characteristics.
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