The Music Genome Project

[sarah]

I read an article about this from the BBC and thought it was at least an interesting concept. While they don't have some of the more obscure indie bands cataloged- I have discovered a lot of new music.

www.pandora.com/


The Music Genome Project

"On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.

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.

Over the past 6 years, we've carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists - ranging from popular to obscure - and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.

It has been quite an adventure, you could say a little crazy - but now that we've created this extraordinary collection of music analysis, we think we can help be your guide as you explore your favorite parts of the music universe."

-Tim Westergren

[Jeff]

Utterly cool.

Strange as it sounds, I had the idea in 1998 of doing something like this with academic disciplines. Especially philosophy would profit from dynamic organization. I guess my idea was a little different because I conceived of ideas and their necessary associations as modules that you could take or leave. The dynamic aspect of the idea lay a module's system of inclusions and exclusions vis a vis other modules. Thus one could create automated system building based on purely logical constraints, thereby making this contentious aspect of philosophy more or less objective, well at least above board...

er...sorry. I am just listening to cool new music and my thoughts are drifting. I started my first three stations with Arcade Fire, DM, and Radiohead. Thanks for the groovy link, Sarah!

[Betterout]

Sarah,

I've not had much of a chance to play around much with this particular site, but I can see that I'll probably be wasting lots of precious time there in the coming months. It's quite interesting, even if my first station wasn't particularly interesting until a few songs in: Neil Young to Neil Young. Whodathunkit? By the way, if you haven't already seen it, you might also be interested in the thread "Shot Gun Get Down (through Relevance Logics)" on the Music forum. It's about 5 pages back, I think. It's also about the 'common-thread' approach to new music discovery, especially as is now technologically realizable. Marconi meets Lomax meets Berners-Lee. (Jeez, I sound like FM radio...)