Pandora is free, personalized radio that plays music that user will love. Just start with the name of one of the user's favorite artists, songs, or composers and Pandora will create a custom station that plays similar tracks.
Learn more at
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pandora.android&hl=en
Since i am not allowed to access to this
website, i decide to study how Pandora Radio works at
howstuffworks.com.
How Pandora Radio works?
When it comes to finding new music for one's library, one can spend hours combing websites for new artists and listening to clips.
With the advent of Web-based "music-discovery services," though, the art of finding new music has changed. Internet radio sites like TagWorld, Last.fm and Pandora allow users to type in a song or artist they like and instantly find other music that might fit their taste.
The difference Pandora and the other two internet radio site is the Music Genome Project. Pandora has no concept of genre, user connections or ratings. Pandora relies on a Music Genome that consists of 400 musical attributes covering the qualities of melody, harmony, rhythm, form, composition and lyrics. It's a project that began in January 2000 and took 30 experts in music theory five years to complete. The Genome is based on an intricate analysis by actual humans of the music of 10,000 artists from the past 100 years. The analysis of new music continues every day since Pandora's online launch in August 2005. As of May 2006, the Genome's music library contains 400,000 analyzed songs from 20,000 contemporary artists.
Pandora.com is an interface while the Music Genome Project is the database. All user do to get started is type a song or artist into the main field of the player. If user type in, say, "Ben Folds" and click the "create" button, user has created a radio station called "Ben Folds Radio" that will only play songs with similar musical traits to Ben Folds' songs.
Pandora automatically displays the Music Genome traits for the first couple of songs our new radio station plays. After that, user can find out exactly why Pandora is playing any song by clicking on the album art and choosing "Why did you play this song?" from the menu. After "Amsterdam," Pandora plays Ben Jelen's "Give It All Away."
"Based on what you've told us so far." It's not just talking about the fact that user likes Ben Folds. Pandora wants user to give it feedback so it can refine the station based on user's likes and dislikes. User can give any song the station plays either a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, and providing this feedback instantly changes the station's playlist. Let's say user don't care for "Give It All Away." To give it a thumbs-down, user left-click on the album art and chose the thumbs-down, "I don't like it" option.
Now Pandora will never play "Give It All Away" on our Ben Folds Radio station again, and it will play songs that are genetically similar to "Give It All Away" less often. If user clicks on the arrow next to the Ben Folds Radio station and choose "Edit this station," user can see that Pandora has put "Give It All Away" on the list of songs user did't like.
Giving a thumbs-up has the opposite effect, that song and other songs like it will play more often. The idea is to continually provide feedback so the station learns more and more about what user like and don't like. The result is a progressively personalized radio station that really does play only music user wants to hear. It takes a while to get there, but most people agree that the feedback process works.
Assembling the Pandora Playlist
So here's what happened behind the scenes when user created his/her Ben Folds Radio station: Pandora located a song by Ben Folds and pulled up the Genome analysis for that song. It then ran an algorithm that compared every song in the Genome database to the genetic makeup of that song in order to identify songs that have similar traits. The algorithm looks for matches across 400 parameters.
Here's just a handful of the traits and concepts it looks at
(definitions excerpted from the Virginia Tech Multimedia Music Dictionary):
• arrangement - the selection and adaptation of a composition or parts of a composition to instruments for which it was not originally designed
• beat - the regular pulse of music
• form - the structure of a composition, the frame upon which it is constructed; based upon repetition, contrast, and variation
• harmony - the concordant (or consonant) combination of notes sounded simultaneously to produce chords
• lyrics - the words of a song
• melody - a succession of tones comprised of mode, rhythm, and pitches so arranged as to achieve musical shape
• orchestration - the art of arranging a composition for performance by an instrumental ensemble
• rhythm - the subdivision of a space of time into a defined, repeated pattern
• syncopation - deliberate upsetting of the meter or pulse of a composition by means of a temporary shifting of the accent to a weak beat or an off-beat
• tempo - the speed of the rhythm of a composition
• vamping - to extemporize the accompaniment to a solo voice or instrument
• voice - the production of sound from the vocal chords, often used in music; falls into six basic categories defined by pitch, ranging, from bottom to top, Bass, Baritone, Tenor, Contralto, Mezzo Soprano, and Soprano
Pandora Concerns
There are, of course, concerns about the Music Genome Project from some in the music world. First, since the Genome is proprietary, there's no possibility for independent review. For all we know, Pandora Media's "experts" don't know the difference between syncopation and vamping. Also, in a much broader way, the Music Genome Project assumes that music's traits can be objectively analyzed at all, that the mind of the listener can be left out of the equation. Some experts doubt that music can be quantified in this way.
Regarding the player itself, an issue arises when user creates a station using an artist as a seed. Some artists have such a varied collection of styles that there are endless ways the Genome algorithm can go when determining matches. In such a case, Pandora may return music user doesn't like at all. For this reason, it's often wise to use a song instead of an artist as a seed.
Learn more at
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/pandora.htm
Photo courtesy
Pandora Media, Inc.
Critical Judgement:
The mechanism of this website works similarly to my idea except for the feedback feature and process. Pandora Radio ran an algorithm that compared every song in the Genome database to identify songs that have similar music traits. As for my project, the recommendation will be generated based on the user's personality trait according to Carl Jung's theory.
