Actually, I _did_ glance through the responses of others before posting my own. My guess is that most folks are in fact curious about others' musical tastes but may be rightly hesitant to critique them.
The contest would also seem silly to me were it not for the fact that I am content to view it with a narrower focus. A computer cannot effectively mimick human characteristics inasmuch as it cannot mimick them all. It can, however, mimick a given subset of human characteristics (i.e., the ones effectively programmed into it). And then, the more interesting material will probably be secondary to its shortcomings anyway.
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Actually, I _did_ glance through the responses of others before posting my own. My guess is that most folks are in fact curious about others' musical tastes but may be rightly hesitant to critique them.
in "classical" you can't beat the Unaccompanied Cello Concertos of J.S. Bach or his Mass in B Minor.
In Jazz I use John Coltrane's "Kinda Blue" or Horace Silver's recent "Jazz Has a Sense of Humor".
In pop/rock/alternative, it's a 3 way tie: Moby's "Play", Catherine Wheel's "Adam and Eve", and Meshell Ndegeocello's "Bitter".
The contest would also seem silly to me were it not for the fact that I am content to view it with a narrower focus. A computer cannot effectively mimick human characteristics inasmuch as it cannot mimick them all. It can, however, mimick a given subset of human characteristics (i.e., the ones effectively programmed into it). And then, the more interesting material will probably be secondary to its shortcomings anyway.