Fun With Pandora

If you're a music geek with a high-speed Internet feed, you probably know Pandora. If not, you should. You feed it a favorite artist or song and it uses some sort of algorithm to find "similar" songs that you might like. It's sort of like having a personalized radio station. The girlfriend turned me onto it (thanks, honey!) and is a great source of background music while I'm, for instance, watching the Barcelona-Lyon match from earlier today.

While a song is playing, the site displays tabs from which you can get different information on the artist, the album from which the song is taken, and the song itself. It's the last bit that's been amusing me lately. The song information consists of a list of three other "similar" tracks and lists five different characteristics of the song. They don't seem incredibly accurate to me, but that's where the fun part comes in.

I'm currently listening to "Trilogy" by ELP, which has these traits:

great musicianship
mild rhythmic syncopation
acoustic rhythm piano
chromatic harmonic structure
demanding instrumental part writing

It's the last one there that really tickles me, because it's always about demanding part writing, but never the playing, which should be equally tricky, right? And that one shows up a lot, which makes sense if you know my musical tastes.

Anyway, it's free and highly recommended.