Mr. B's Blog

In October of 1990, the Human Genome Project officially began.  Thirteen years later scientists completed mapping the 20,000-25,000 genes found in the human body.   What was next for mapping?  What else but music! In January of 2000, the Music Genome Project was created by Will Glaser, Jon Kraft, and Tim Westergren.  The project would describe music through 500 attributes and categorize them with an algorithm.   Each song is analyzed and assigned about 150-500 genes, or musical characteristics.  Analyzing a song takes about a half-hour and is usually done by more than one musician for reliability.  A distance function creates a list of similar songs with similar genes.  Pandora (www.pandora.com) is the name of the company and music player that supports the MGP.  You simply go to the webpage, enter an artist or song title and bam, the piece you were thinking of (usually) pops up.  The excitement is what happens next.  The MGP describes the music you selected and then selects similar mus...

The Pentucket Regional High School Band has just been accepted to perform in the 2009 Boston St. Patrick's Day Parade. A big thank you to fellow faculty member Jim Potenza who helped us get into the event. The band is extremely excited about this. We are going to be taking out the old marching band uniforms out of storage and ordering new pants. The band will be performing in front of a crowd of over a half-million spectators. This is a new beginning for many big events for our band program!