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Pandora's music box
  Posted: August 17, 2006
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I'll admit a strange fascination with the "recommendation engines" scattered around the on-line world, that take lists of things you like (through purchase or claimed preference), and suggest things you'd probably also like. The bulk of these systems seem to use collaborative filtering software to match the patterns of your choices with a database of other user preferences (ie, Amazon's "users who bought this book also bought...").

Pandora Internet Radio uses an altogether different approach...matching artists and songs based on their 'genetics,' or the fundamental qualities of the musical performance and composition. Say the folks at Pandora:

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song -- everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records -- it's about what each individual song sounds like.

Each user may not agree with that those fundamental genes are, or how they should be combined. But the discovery process the system allows is rather fun to listen to, and fascinating to explore. Give a listen.