Pandora Radio

Introduction

Pandora Radio is essentially a radio station that learns from a listener’s music preferences.

Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora, was originally a musician. When he worked as a composer for movies, he found that different directors liked different styles of musical composition. Westergren began to wonder if he could create a formula or codify the tastes of the directors he was working for, to somehow break them down into something that could predict a person’s music taste.

With this big idea in mind, Westergren found that this analytical way of seeing music could have the potential to become something truly innovative. In 1999, He started a company focused on decoding music, calling it the “Music Genome Project,” with the common goal of simply bringing people more music that they liked.

Music Genome Project

The Music Genome Project was finally completed in late 1999, with the mission of “capturing the essence of music at the fundamental level.” They were able to create a formulaic way to decode music by using complex mathematical algorithms. They assigned around 400 attributes to characteritize any given song.

The Music Genome Project became the backbone of Pandora Internet Radio. They were able to successfully organize all this music data by having a “musicologist” analyze all the songs in their library (there are over 700,000 with roughly 10,000 new songs being added each month). These musicologists are usually musicians themselves with strong backgrounds in music theory. With these 400 attributes as a foundation to make music into quantifiable data, they break down and rate every song, from the “soulfulness” of the vocals to the rhythmic and key changes.

How To Use Pandora Radio

When you first log into their website, you start a radio station by simply typing in a name of a song, an artist, or a combination of both. Pandora accesses the Music Genome Project, and creates a station based on the artist or song you’ve selected. Pandora not only can create a radio station based on the attributes of one song or artist, but it can also learn from your preferences as you listen to the station. There’s is rating system allowing you to thumbs up or thumbs down a song, which in turn allows Pandora to learn from your unique music tastes to further create better music choices. In addition, Pandora provides other menu choices such as “i’m tired of this song” and “why was this song chosen.”

OpenLaszlo

Pandora Radio media player is based on the platform of OpenLaszlo. OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for developing user friendly web based applications, which work identically across all popular browsers and platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, IE, Firefox, Safari, etc). It's ideal for presenting and editing raw XML data generated by PHP and other web services.

OpenLaszlo supports a rich graphics model with scalable vectors, bitmaps, movies, animation, transparency, fonts, audio, streaming media, reusable components, user interface widgets, control panels, property sheets, keyboard navigation, browser "back button" navigation, as well as advanced WYSIWYG text and graphical editing tools.


Works Cited

http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml

http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/124
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/pandora6.htm
http://tomconrad.blogspot.com/2005/08/pandora-and-openlaszlo.html