Politblogo

Musical Friday, a first

Long-time buddy Craig at theoria usually has these Musical Friday things where he somehow manages to find mp3 samples of his favoriate songs and post them with a brief review for our delectation.  He hasn't done so yet today, so I thought I'd actually try this out and pre-empt him for once.  I do have a bit of an ulterior motive: I received a CD I purchased online and am very happy with that my purchse: The Dawnseeker by Sleepthief.

It does not, at least, release all the ills of the world

I have lately been experimenting with Pandora, which is apparently the music industry's answer to complaints about its inflexibility regarding technology.  For those of you not in the know, Pandora stems from a music classification project called, pretentiously, The Music Genome Project.  The general idea is that you give it the name of a band or a song that you like, and it creates a "radio station" which plays songs similar to it, based on the MGP classification scheme. Then you give each song a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" as it plays, and it refines its song-selection criterion based on your reactions. 

The price for this: the usual.  Internet ads or subscription.   The biggest drawback?  Naturally, they classified mostly contemporary popular music of one form or another.  They claim that they will get around to it, but the MGP currently contains very little classical music or opera or whatnot.

Which is a problem, because I like that stuff.

But...it does contain things that I like.  One of which is the electronica/trance group (or whatever, I'm not familiar with such designations) Delerium.  Delerium is most famous for the song "Silence", one of which is performed by Sarah MacLachlan and can occasionally be heard on mainstream radio stations. 

Alas, when it comes to mainstream popular music, or even slightly-off-mainstream stuff like Delerium, my tastes are really very narrow.  It turns out that, at least using Pandora/MGP's song feature classifications, most of what it considers to be similar to Delerium, well, I'm at best somewhat "meh" about.  It really doesn't find anything similar to Delerium.  And this is true for the other artists and songs which I tried.  I suspect that it would (Delerium can't be THAT unique) if I had designed the classification system, because the features in the system are often not ones that I care all that much about.  I can definitely see the logic in some of its choices, but it isn't my logic.

It can also be inflexible.  One can skip music one doesn't like (indeed, giving a thumb's down interrupts the performance immediately), but there's a limit one can do this per hour, because of the licensing scheme.   And, of course, you can't request specific songs.  Even the song you give it as the starting criterion usually won't be played at that moment, but maybe later.

On the plus side, you can create multiple radio stations and run different musical experiments.

So, do I like it?  Well, it's OK.  I have heard a few good songs that I wouldn't otherwise have encountered were I not using it.  But I also heard a lot of dreck.  I'll keep experimenting with it, but I might get bored after a while if the classification system doesn't eventually narrow down to something approximating my tastes.