Dissecting Songs Down to Their 'Musical Genome'

Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "The company Pandora Media takes a different tack for its online music-recommendation service. When you tell Pandora a song you like or have bought, it doesn't mine its sales database for records of other purchases by those who have bought the song. Instead, it looks for songs with a similar musical profile, based on a database of 300,000 songs rated on up to 400 characteristics like rhythmic syncopation, vamping and vocal harmonies. To analyze the songs, Pandora has hired Bay Area musicians like San Francisco jazz guitarist Bob Coons. 'When Mr. Coons describes a particular song, he uses phrases like the "complexity of the chromaticism" and "richness of the harmonic structure." He has studied the chord structure in Britney Spears' "Oops I Did It Again," and reports that it is "actually fairly complex," ' the Wall Street Journal Online reports."

Comments

I'm a musician..

[DJayC]

I'm a musician, and I told it some songs I liked and it's playing a customized radio station of songs that I should like... and it's dead on.

The best part is that you can ask it "Why are you playing this song", and it will explain it to you.. in terms of the song structure and things like that.

These are real people analyzing these songs.. this seems like a great service to find new music from bands you don't know. Taking bands out of the context of a "social circle" (like Amazon and itunes do by simply looking at 'people who purchased this also purchased...') is a GREAT idea.

I urge you to support this project if you are a music lover, or at least check it out and listen for a couple hours.

Re:But wati

[Teux]

Their system allows you to set different "stations"

Each station gives you the ability to add a few different types of music, but it's not recommended that you try to mix radically different types. You'll have to use old fashioned judgement to choose a broad category you want to listen to, it does the rest of the work exploring similar music.

Re:B. Spears Music "Fairly Complex"

[dgatwood]

Harmonically complex? For somebody who has never taken a music theory course, maybe. The song is just trivially switching between a minor key and the relative major key, and uses two chords in each. Yeah, if you try to write it out as though it stayed in one key, the notation gets a little ugly, but...:

Minor key: I V I
Relative Major: V I V I
Relative Minor key: V I V I
Relative Major V I
Relative Minor V I

Or, more traditionally:

VI IIIMaj VI
V I V I
IIImaj VI IIIMaj VI
V I
IIIMaj VI

Harmonically complex is Macarthur Park. "Oops" has the harmonic vocabulary of a turnip.

From http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/columns/music_theor y/writing_unusual_and_original_chord_progressions. html

First, I will show one of the simplest (and most common) way that a songs chord vocabulary is extended, is simply by adding the major chords from the keys parallel minor scale....

(Emphasis mine.)

Um

[a.different.perspect]

Actually, that was a parody -- and a very funny one too. You can download it here. In actual fact, as Wikipedia says, "Oops!... I Did It Again was written and produced by constant suppliers Max Martin and Rami."