46&2
I came across Pandora which is a music service based upon the data compiled in the Music Genome Project. All boring stuff aside, Pandora asks you to enter a song you like, breaks it down based upon basic musical qualities and cross references that data with their database. What seems to emerge is a whole shit load of pure goodness.
I entered 46&2 a song by Tool and the inspiration for the title of this blog. After several minutes (yeah... way too long!) they returned one selection. The selection wasn't what inspired me as they explicitly stated they were going to play a song from Tool to start me off. Rather it was the in depth description provided that blew me away. Read on dear reader:
"Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features hard rock roots, mild rhythmic syncopation, a subtle use of vocal harmony, minor key tonality and demanding instrumental part writing."
I've used several other referential services like Rhapsody and eMusic to help me gain a sense of what I'd like. Needless to say if I entered Tool, I'd always get something like A Perfect Circle or the Deftones. No problem with that, but they don't necessarily share the same musical components.
So then came the real test. What songs will play next? The Ritual by Testament came on next. Never really heard of it even though I've heard of Testament even though I've never really explored their catalog. It's pretty decent. What I'm hoping for was a little more base and drumming which is something I love about Tool. So at this point I could vote it down or up. Let's find out what happens when I vote it down.
So it moved me right on to the next song by Anthrax. Pretty good. A little more hard pounding than Tool, but still classic metal.
All in all, I'm very hopeful and looking forward to being able to test this service.
Disclaimer: I have always had and always will have better taste in music. This is a fact. There are no opinions here. Your ability to differentiate complex sounds make you tonal peon and you deserve a fate worse than death. May the dark lords of Ragnarök hunt your morbid soul till the ends of the earth and feast upon your flesh. So it is written.
I feel almost morally obliged to reference you to my source for Pandora. While it doesn't really talk to much about the service, it does talk about the creator and his past business. Very intriguing if you like to hear how persistence is one of the keys to success.
Update: Apparently the service is getting pounded and crashes on occasion. Not exactly best selling point. I definitely won't be paying any money for this till they get that fixed.
There is one feature I wish I could work with. What if they categorized all their attributes (from above we have the attribute subtle use of vocal harmony from the vocal category) and let me pick which ones I wanted. Then it would return a list of groups that met this criteria. I couldn't imagine picking more than 4 or 5 attributes for a song unless I was trying to break the system.
posted by Mitesh @ 12:37 PM
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