The Music Genome Project and Pandora

The Music Genome Project is a fascinating piece of technology.

In a nutshell, they have classified thousands of tracks not by genre, but by the musical signatures within each song – all the musical things like harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, lyrics, et al.

And then they have built Pandora – an interface to this remarkable database. With Pandora you can choose an artist or a song, and it will keep playing similar music in a ‘radio station’ geared specifically for you. But that’s not all. If you click the ‘Guide Us’ button, you can also say whether you like a particular song or not, and change the playlist accordingly.

Very clever neural-network type stuff.

I am not going to re-write their faq. Rather, I suggest you try it out yourself. http://www.pandora.com/ It is free, with some non-intrusive advertising. But you will also need a US zip-code. (http://zipinfo.com/)

As a music player it has limited functionality. But as a concept, I sincerely hope they have patented it.

But now think of the possibilities for this technology.

• Media players like the iPod or even Windows Media Centre. You just choose one song and it builds a dynamic playlist for you, intelligently.



• Old-style over-the-airwaves radio stations that play what its listeners want to hear. Imagine being able to see the next track options, and choose your favourite by txting in, or via the station’s website. The song with the best vote plays, and the playlist evolves. How this will work in practice I’m not sure, but maybe the RDS channel could be used. (The folks at http://www.rds.org.uk/ suggest that RDS is contently evolving.) DAB must have an equivalent mechanism. A spin-off from this, is that because the radio station is getting money from people txting in, they might be able to do away with advertising. And annoying presenters.



• Obviously online radio stations, but then Pandora itself is an online radio station.



• Cataloguing. Books can be classified by the Dewey Decimal Classification system, but music seems to be limited to vague genres. If this technology could “genre-rate” a unique catalogue code for every song, it might be very useful to the music industry.

This whole system has limitations though. Currently, the Music Genome Project seems to be reliant on a few people to classify music, which in itself is a slow process. It would be silly to open up the classification to the public and let non-professionals have their say. Simply look at Wikipedia. Wikipedia is brilliant in itself (I’ve used it at least once today myself), but it is prone to errors and misinformation. Can we trust Joe Public to do the job currently being done by qualified musicians? Maybe, is my short term answer. Maybe there is a way for Joe to pre-classify songs.

Could this technology be extended to other media? Like books, TV shows, or movies? I’m quite sure the underlying algorithm could. What about classifying people? I’m sure dating services – or rather their punters would benefit. What about news or other information? I’m suggesting that it’s not about the music, but rather about the concepts around classifying things, and then choosing the most appropriate thing to show you next.

The possibilities of this technology is endless. I know some people are going to argue that it has been around for eons, but my retort is that we now have the technology to harness it and put it into our daily lives.

I’ll say it again. I sincerely hope the boys behind Pandora and the Music Genome Project have protected their intellectual property appropriately (for their own back-pockets sake). And I sincerely hope they start licensing the technology out as soon as possible. There is great potential here!