Saturday, August 19, 2006

My Musical Genome

Ok Rohan,
Admit it..This blog title has you interested..

I have found a source of endless music on the Internet - tripleW.pandora.com. This site was introduced to me by a colleague of mine - Neel. ( as in neal and nikki...).

Very interesting concept.

Often you like a piece of music and listen to it like two hundred times..but then what .. ? Dont you feel the need to listen to something like what you have just heard? Sure you could buy the album or ask your friends around who will help you out with their limited knowledge on more of such kind...

Now figure this, can you tell me one reason why the radio is so popular? My personal opinion is that because the radio plays music on an endless shuffle mode. The surprise of randomness is what makes the radio so popular - though the chances of listening to himesh chamiya ..sorry!..typo...re-shame-iya...in every second song is very very high......

The only problem with radio is that it caters to a very large audience and is forced to play popular music - imagine in a city like mumbai with 6 active radio stations only one of them plays angrezi geet, AIR (so dont go blowing up All India Radio base stations just yet, pls)..So you are forced to listen to sub standard stuff in the hope that something good trots along..

Pandora.com is a project intitiated by musicians. Here you specify a song / artist which u like a lot. Based on the analysis of the first song played by Pandora, the next song is automatically selected from a huge pool of songs...this goes on....each song that Pandora selects, you get to vote if the song is to your liking or not...based on your input, the next song is selected. Very interesting.

Do not treat this as a station which plays your requests online. It strives to play your kind of music and retains the random nature of the radio. Take my advice and give it a shot.

Cheers

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey,

I did check out the Pandora.com site. its amazing. u knw how much i like the "surprise" factor. and i heard so many different and new bands like - Dixie Chicks and dunno how many more are to come.
but why are they playing the music for free? what r they gaining?
canon

Aditya Saraogi said...

I think as this a a project and the bigger aim is to establish the characteristics of a musical piece which attracts people, this arrangement has been made. In fact when I rate a song here, I do it with full sincerity knowing that my input is considered valuable and affects the project directly / indirectly.

Think of it this way, instead of having established genres like Pop, Jazz, Classic, Rock etc a whole new categorization will emerge...you will have interesting options of listening to music which has been formed after "pairing" up two different streams...

great project