the music genome project
When Grace and I moved to Brooklyn, we held (many) moving sales in my old apartment back in Milwaukee both to raise some cash as well as cut down on the stuff to haul. One of the things that just wasn't worth the space/energy moving across the country was my old stack stereo. Since then we've been talking about purchasing something new and just haven't managed to get around to it. Well, since I'm basically teathered to a computer, I have recently gotten back into listening to free music online.
For iTunes users, free radio - organized by genre - can be found there. I've found that there tends to be a lot of lagging via iTunes. A few other favorite stations I hit up a lot are KRUI (Iowa City College Station) that plays a lot of unknown 'starvin-artist' types and WOXY (out of Cincinnati, OH) that plays a great mix of old and new/unknown alt rock and roll.
Click to listen to KRUI | Click to listen to WOXY
Even more recently (and better in my opinion) I have revisited Pandora Music - who since 2000 has been the leading force for The Music Genome Project.
excerpt taken from pandora.com:
"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."
What I find fantastic about this site is the introduction of new music into your vocabulary with little-to-no work/time spent. Basically, you sign up for a free account and then log in. To start a 'station' just put in a name of a band/artist that you like it'll do the rest. The first song you hear is generally by the artist you named, then it takes off mixing in some of your artist as well as others that have that same sound/feel to the music. I'm rockin my favorite station as of late while I type this - "Hot Chip".
recent branches
This pandora program looks like what computers were (or should have been) made for - making connections between patterns that one might not otherwise discover, as a way to find new sources of interest. Thanks for the link.
It'll be fun to see where it takes us from each of our original entry points. In that spirit, here's a group (still intact and around? I dunno) I liked circa 1992-97: US3. They went into the BlueNote vaults of master recordings, and then made some interesting remixes. Not a bad way to learn about current artists, and to sample (literally and figuratively, here) older ones. -J
This site sounds sweet. I know what I'll be doing tomorrow during my moments of mental relaxation while working on the computer.
Pandora Rocks!!!!! I give it a big thumbs up.
it's like your best friend who has great music taste. it gets almost TOO good when you start to play around with voting a song (thumbs up or down)and the program adjusts the station's 'style' accordingly.
i'm an addict. :)
We played around with this program again today, and the more I see the more impressed I am. We have tuned different stations for different people, and it's uncanny how it learns from your suggestions (although why does it keep trying to get me to listen to Huey Lewis and the News? I say I like B52s: Huey Lewis. Cannonball Adderly: Huey Lewis. Stan Getz: Huey Lewis. The Monkeys: Huey Lewis. Can't I say "it's not the music genome style of the song I don't care for, it's actually the SINGER I don't want to hear more from"?).
Anyway, is it possible to run the digital signal, that Pandora supplies, from an output jack on the computer into an (RCA style) input jack on my HiFi? Seems silly to have great music on my computer, and better speakers across the room on the HiFi, with the two machines not talking to each other.
ya, i'd say my biggest 'complaint' with pandora is that if you are away from the computer (not active) it seems to loop in a lot of repeats or possibly even stop playing. not sure if you noticed, but if you roll over a song you can give it a thumbs up or down (click on the icons) and then it will adjust your playlist accordingly.
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