Media Response 4 - Opening Pandora

I personally discovered (I say personally because I have known about this website for a long time because many at work use it) Pandora this last Friday. For those of you who do not know what Pandora is, this is what they say about themselves: Click Here. In my words, Pandora is a website that allows you to “create” your own radio stations based on your tastes in music (having a great deal of input into the radio station even after it is “created”) and then saving them to an account so you can always reference those stations again. I was hooked; since Friday I already have 13 personal radio stations with varying styles depending upon what I know my usual moods are.

As fun as it is to be able to set up your own radio stations (that have minimal audio commercial interruptions, though there are always ads posted and the ability to buy the songs you have listened to), what is fascinating is the theoretical background behind the website’s creation: “The Music Genome Project.” 8 years of music analysis “uncovered” over 400 distinct “musical characteristics” (a very obvious structuralism perspective). Pandora relies upon trained music analysts (rather than software) to create these differentiations in taxonomy and connecting that musicological information to songs and artists.

Pedagogically, this raises for me some interesting ideas regarding literacies. One thing is this is audio literacy, and audio literacy that is looking at the codes involved in different genres of music from (as far as I can tell) a purely auditory experience. Another thing is we can use this as a microcosmic way of studying multimodal literacy: audio, visual, informational, and digital. Therefore, a discussion of how “The Music Genome Project” was possibly orchestrated and what standards were developed to “measure” music would be enlightening for a young group thinking about their own personal tastes of music and how they would describe their auditory experiences. Also, the microcosm of this one website and its marriage of modes could be broken down on so many levels: What does the site’s very existence say about us as individuals? What are the assumptions that are made regarding us as consumers? What part does the information about artists and songs play in our understanding of the media presented?