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The Music Genome Project

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 music from different artists.  It is sort of like the Amazon.com feature of "If you like this book, you might like..." What is so cool about this is that the MGP will tell you how the songs relate.  We are talking extremely descriptive attributes like melody, harmony, instrumentation, and feel.  

In a nutshell, Pandora and the MGP lets you listen to music passively like on the radio, but gives you the information to be actively engaged in the music if you so choose.  Clearly "The Grout" would benefit to publish its information in accordance to the MGP.  

To share this great information, I have assigned the following to my Music Production I students for their question of the week on the class wiki:

The Music Genome Project: Pandora
Step 1: Read the description of the Music Genome Project (Click Here)
Step 2: Go to www.pandora.com
Step 3: Hit "Create a New Station"
Step 4: Type in an Artist or Song and hit "Create" (A new station will develop and a song will play)
Step 5: Listen to the first song that plays and the two after that
Step 6: Compare and contrast the first song with the latter two (use musical terms)


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