Pandora: An online music discovery platform from the Music Genome Project

Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help users find and enjoy music. It’s powered by the Music Genome Project, one of the most comprehensive analyses of music ever undertaken.

According to Tom Westergren, the founder of the project, the analytical engine that drives the service was created by “assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like.”

After you’ve clicked over to the Web site, all you have to do is enter a few of your favorite songs or artists and Pandora launches “a streaming station to explore that part of the music universe.” The more you listen, the more accurate Pandora becomes in predicting which other artists and tracks will be within your boundaries of taste, much as speech recognition software becomes more accurate with greater use.