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Pandora and me
June 19, 2007
A couple of friends recommended it, but it took a few hours alone in a hotel room for me to open this amazing box.
Pandora.com, a product of the Music Genome Project, moves my musical interests way beyond my meager iTunes collection. Beyond what I thought I liked to listen to.
Based on my thumbs up or thumbs down votes, when I set up a music "station," the Web-based application builds an understanding of my quirky musical tastes. In this short time, Pandora knows me pretty well. It now introduces me to new artists whose songs I instantly like.
I am discovering other folks who have set up equally quirky stations. (Hard to believe there are others who like combinations of Grateful Dead, Susan Werner, Rod Stewart, the Rolling Stones, Motown, anything folky, Bob Dylan, Dar Williams, and Michael Buble.)
Pandora's single mission: "To play music you'll love - and nothing else."
Since 2000, the team of fifty musician-analysts:
has been listening to music, one song at a time, studying and collecting literally hundreds of musical details on every song. It takes 20-30 minutes per song to capture all of the little details that give each recording its magical sound - melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics ... and more - close to 400 attributes!
When you seach a song or artist, Pandora scans
its entire world of analyzed music, almost a century of popular recordings - new and old, well known and completely obscure - to find songs with interesting musical similarities to your choice.
Okay, this is a lot of fun. But think about using this site to demonstrate the concept of Web 2.0 with learners (and with teachers).
It models all of the following: push technology, collective intelligence, collaboration, sophisticated media searching, and interactivity.
Open this box. Your students will think this is very cool, even if their stations look quite different from yours.
Posted by Joyce Valenza on June 19, 2007 | Comments (3)
