Pandora.com personalised radio

I just discovered it last week, and I must say it has become one of my favorite toys, and a great tool for discovering unseen connections in music.

I began by creating a station for Kraftwerk. Then I created a station for Afrikaa Bambataa. Then I tried to ge tmy Bambataa channel to play some Kraftwerk. Best I could get was all old electro-rap. But then I discovered the "Add Music" link.

Now, I continually add music to my work listening as i wake up. Its like djing my own radio station.

I really don't buy the hype about finding connections in music. It doesn't seem to work any better than if they just confined the radiostations to a genre or similar bands.

it's working pretty interestingly for me at the moment...

station = kraftwerk + brian eno + durutti column, and I get Album Leaf out of it...

shudder said:

it's working pretty interestingly for me at the moment...

station = kraftwerk + brian eno + durutti column, and I get Album Leaf out of it...

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hm... based on the above list, it just started playing me some trance, "because it features techno roots, a knack for catchy hooks, synthy riffs, thickly layered production and a highly synthetic sonority".. really, on those criteria, kraftwerk = trance.

Yeah it unfortunately throws up trance on rather a lot of stuff. Just make sure you give the trance the big "thumbs down" - and it won't bring it up again.

ive found that you cant really get the results you want without nudging it. i gotta keep sayin yes and no.

as far as finding roots, it doesnt work exactly like being able to see the band or genre's influences. what i see more is the musical similarities between genres, as most of the criteria in pandora seem to be musical structure.

there was a topic about this earlier, but it helps someone tryin to Dj across genre lines. If i can create a station based off of Kraftwerk, Icey, Matthew Dear, Afrikaa Bambataa, and 2 Live Crew, it will eventually play al of those genre's back to back. This helps me to see, er, hear, their musical connections.

but granted, it isnt the best at this.

I was initially very sceptical about this. It's perfectly fine if you give it a broad enough genre, then it just plays the stuff you want to hear. As a personalised radio station in the background it's brilliant. However, as a way of finding connections between genres it's not so good - my electro/dub/jungle/Motown/funk/drone input has so far confused it - it tends to do things in batches rather than find deep musical connections. Also, it could do with some finer tuning on the thumbs up/thumbs down bit. A track might have come up for all the right reasons, but if it's no good, it's gonna get the thumbs down.

i've just stumbled across this and discovered 3 new great bands I've never heard of really quickly:
- yeah... after a few tracks it can go really wrong but as long as you tell it what you dont like it it works great for a bit. - I mean I could use allmusic and soulseak to do the same thing, but this is a very convenient tool as you hear stuff instantly and keep a record of your tastes.
thumbs up!
--
Rafs

Seems like everybody got here before me. Oh well.

It's certainly worth doing the whole feedback lark.

But I wonder, is this a good way to listen to music? After a while, a long and happy while, everything began to sound a bit derivative and I began to reminisce about the late Peel's non-sequitorial style of musical programing. Plus I always hate it when someone says "oh if you like that you're bound to love this" and you hear it and you don't and then you begin to have second thoughts about the stuff you liked in the first place...

Still listening to it though. Has anyone else noticed that sooner or later it always plays a talking heads track?

Frankly, it may have been the search I ran, but on first run. . . I'm impressed, and a little spooked.


I searched for "This Heat," as a test. It apparently latched onto the "24 Track Loop" This Heat (actually, "Repeat," the extended mix) which is ok, as I like that permutation just fine. I have to say, I listened to about 20 tracks, even some by indie rock bands I'd normally dismiss, and it only completely missed the mark on maybe three or four tracks. There wasn't a totally obvious commonality between all the tracks--but I could see where the robot was coming from.

I'm a little surprised Dissensus hasn't had more to say about the philosophical/musical/social/ethical/whatever ramifications of this sort of thing. I haven't much to add, yet, myself.


Took 22 tracks to get to a real stinker, but oh boy, what a horrible stinker--neo-prog to end all wankfests, something called "Liquid Tension" which is apparently what they'll play for me when I go to hell, based on the apparent fact that This Heat, John Cale, Glenn Kotche, et all feature "extensive vamping".

Definitely could do with a more nuanced response format than "thumbs up/thumbs down," if they're really interested in advancing their project/marketeering. I may like something, but not because it's actually connected. I'd also like to be able to atomically blast to hell the occasionally really awful thing.


I have to say, through about 25 tracks--I've heard at least 5 things I've never heard of that I'd voluntarily listen to again, that if I had the money to spare I might look into purchasing.


And I have to say, this thing doesn't seem to be peddling any paid-up wares--I'm only guessing, but I'm pretty sure whoever Quintron is, for example, they're not on the Pitchforkmedia payola-train. So as yet (and this thing may be some sort of Trojan horse sneaking in innocently enough) I can't say this is a corrupt venture (as I don't mind it being capitalistic per se--better a meritocratic, user-driven commercial program like this than the old Top 40, I say).

Several hours in, definitely does favour new releases, but frankly, it's getting me to hear some young kids I'd probably write off normally, none of it amazing, but some of it not too bad really.

I only seem to be able to get a taster as I am not resident in the US - any way round this?

jenks said:

I only seem to be able to get a taster as I am not resident in the US - any way round this?

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Yep. Weirdly I stumbled across this site just yesterday and joined and have now just caught up with this thread. (I took favoured Kraftwerk radio. Spooky!)

Anyway, Jenks, this is what I did: I put the only street name in the whole USA that I knew (Bleecker Street) into Google with the term 'zip code' and up came a few sights you can use to track down zip codes. I put Bleecker St (or is it Bleacker?) into one of these and just put the resultant code into the Pandora registration thang. Simple as.

cheers, someone just mailed me a random manhattan zip code that did the trick - really rather impressed with the site - strangely compelling

soundslike1981 said:

I'm a little surprised Dissensus hasn't had more to say about the philosophical/musical/social/ethical/whatever ramifications of this sort of thing. I haven't much to add, yet, myself.

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I said a little about it last year on the blog, but nothing terribly profound. Having played around on Pandora since then, I think it functions best as a personal background radio with the added bonus of zero Chris Moyles and Russell Brand. Whenever I've tried it, it's only brought up things I already know (and like), or no-name limp imitation stuff, which I just skip.

I was at a conference once where an idea similar to Pandora (may have been Pandora itself, I don't remember) was presented to a room of computer music techies. One of the examples played was 'Rimshot' by Erykah Badu, which relies heavily on the bass riff from Miles Davis' 'So What'. The presentation showed a bunch of ways in which the system might categorise the Badu track, but made no reference to Miles; so in the questions I asked - and was met by a stunned silence. The guy presenting hadn't made the connection (OK), but more to the point hadn't even thought that this sort of thing - actual musical correspondences that you can pick out and hold in your hands as it were - were relevant to organising music - even though this exact procedure is how so much music is made (how the Erykah Badu track was made, certainly). The system abstracts into musical categories that have increasing irrelevance (Cale's 'extensive vamping' puts in him the same box as Count Basie, surely!), rather than historical/compositional categories that actually reflect the material world of music creation and reception - the link between Cale and This Heat makes more sense this way, eg.

I think I prefer Last.fm's people-centric approach, or at least i've had better results.

With Pandora, I put in Spacemen 3 and got a bunch of tedious indie, I put in Hawkwind and got Bon fucking Jovi.

Rambler said:

I said a little about it last year on the blog, but nothing terribly profound. Having played around on Pandora since then, I think it functions best as a personal background radio with the added bonus of zero Chris Moyles and Russell Brand. Whenever I've tried it, it's only brought up things I already know (and like), or no-name limp imitation stuff, which I just skip.

I was at a conference once where an idea similar to Pandora (may have been Pandora itself, I don't remember) was presented to a room of computer music techies. One of the examples played was 'Rimshot' by Erykah Badu, which relies heavily on the bass riff from Miles Davis' 'So What'. The presentation showed a bunch of ways in which the system might categorise the Badu track, but made no reference to Miles; so in the questions I asked - and was met by a stunned silence. The guy presenting hadn't made the connection (OK), but more to the point hadn't even thought that this sort of thing - actual musical correspondences that you can pick out and hold in your hands as it were - were relevant to organising music - even though this exact procedure is how so much music is made (how the Erykah Badu track was made, certainly). The system abstracts into musical categories that have increasing irrelevance (Cale's 'extensive vamping' puts in him the same box as Count Basie, surely!), rather than historical/compositional categories that actually reflect the material world of music creation and reception - the link between Cale and This Heat makes more sense this way, eg.

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It would be neat to have more conscious/intentional connections and correlations involved--but I think it's a somewhat interesting idea that they ignore "what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records" and instead attempt to focus on "what each individual song sounds like . . . everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony". Recommendations based on historical, personnell, sampling, genre, homage, etc. seem better made by actual people. Something attempting this sort of semi-scientific, semi-objective approach is, to my mind, an interesting addition to the traditional methods of linking--and one that could really only be pulled off through immense quantites of data (which, of course, involves some fairly subjective criteria, but also some fairly specific/musical ones).

Certainly it can't replace traditional, more apparent, perhaps more "real" ways of linking artists and predicting enjoyment such as those you point out---but especially as it slowly refines its connections, it could certainly augment them. I suppose I'm open to this idea because I tend to try to strike a balance between paying attention to context (historic, social, political, material, etc.) and ignoring it in favour of my sense of "the thing itself". Eclecticism is not an end unto itself, and it can certainly lead to confusion and diffusion, but I still find something noble (or at least enjoyable) about "decontextualised" leaps and links between sounds across time, location, class, etc.--because in some sense, that's what (pop) music is, whether a good thing or not: it's more about the holes in the fences than the slats, it's about intermingling and cross-breeding. Obviously, good music is often the "lemonade from lemons" result of violent, forced "intermingling". Maybe it's imperialist-minded of me or whatever--but listening broadly and even randomly is a privelege I enjoy at my particular historical/cultural point in time.

Something attempting this sort of semi-scientific, semi-objective approach is, to my mind, an interesting addition to the traditional methods of linking

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You may well, be right, but I'm just sceptical as to how effectively this can be done scientifically. Style, as a century of musicology has shown, is a notoriously difficult thing to pin down and categorise. The real connections between pieces of music are either conscious on the part of the artist - quotation, sampling, etc; or historical (in which case the musical connections can be pretty tangential); or aesthetic, on the part of the listener, which is damn near impossible to quantify. (Interestingly, it's through listeners, who have some sort of database entry system in front of them, that Pandora generates its data, so the subjective is being thrown right into the method, but processed as something rational.)

and one that could really only be pulled off through immense quantites of data (which, of course, involves some fairly subjective criteria, but also some fairly specific/musical ones)

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Absolutely. The real limitation of Pandora at the moment is not necessarily the method, but the amount of music they have to apply it to - hence things like Bon Jovi coming up when one might have expected Acid Mothers Temple, eg.