Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

Finding New Music

Tuesday, May 30th, 2006

I love when awesome projects get some time in the spotlight or at least are recognized.

Today, I found a link on lifehacker.com referring to an article on extremetech.com addressing the problem of music becoming boring or stagnant. I’ve been a huge fan of Pandora.com and Digitally Imported.com (or di.fm) for years now. I had heard of last.fm but had not really done much looking into it until recently.

I highly recommend that you check these out, especially Pandora. It is by far my favorite source of new music. In the mean time, go read the article at extremetech.

Up and Coming

Friday, March 10th, 2006

A new face has appeared on the music scene: Scottish singer, KT Tunstall (Kate) who has an eary similarity vocal style to Louise Rhodes of Lamb while her musical styles are much closer to Norah Jones yet a refreshing step or two further away than Norah from the styles of Patsy Cline (yes, you read that right - test the theory).

If you’re interested in hearing this awesome artist, you could always listen to a few samples using iTunes, but who wants to hear only 30 second snippets of music - especially when you could just visit Pandora and listen to an entire playlist of full songs inspired by whatever artist you want! Try creating a playlist “inspired by” KT Tunstall and see if you find a sing or two in there by her. I’d be surprised if there are many of you who don’t enjoy the music.
So far, the only bad thing about her that I can find is her website! If you’re using Firefox, be prepared to once again… switch over to Internet Explorer for a single website. Grrr.

Pandora

Friday, November 4th, 2005

Like music? Then you’d love Pandora.

It’s a tad hard to describe, but basically it asks for either a song or artist that you like and builds a playlist from that. You listen through the endless playlist and tell Pandora whether you like or dislike the current song. It eventually starts to discern your likes and dislikes in music taste and begins to play more songs that match your seemingly desired music style while leaving out the ones you seemingly don’t like. This is all made possible due to the The Music Genome Project: A “music gene” mapping project which is geared toward identifying the aspects that makes a song the song that it is.

It says that the first 10 hours of listening are free, but before I purchased a 3 three month subscription for $12, I was well past 10 hours of listening at both my home and work!! The worst part of not having an account is that it does not remember the songs preferences you select while listening from session to session. It will remember them through one sitting though, and as long as you don’t close the window, you’re good to go!

My favorite part is that it actually provides you with information regarding why it played a certain song. In the interface, there is an option called “Why did you play this song?” An example taken from Hungry by Kosheen:

Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features use of tonal harmonies, acoustic guitar layering, a variety of synth sounds, trippy soundscapes and may other similarities identified in the music genome project.

As you can see, it is extremely specific regarding the qualities found within this song. Give it a try! Just tell it a song or band that encapsulates your favorite music style and you’re off finding new favorite bands!! Have fun… ;) (more…)