ARTS

PROJECT SEEKS GENES IN MUSIC

KARA PLATONI - Today's lab team: one drummer, two saxophonists, two
guitarists, one bassist, two pianists, one violinist. Today's specimen:
Eminem's rap anthem "Lose Yourself." Today's mission: crack all 235 of
the song's genes. Yes, genes.

Welcome to the Music Genome Project, the most awesomely and exhaustively
nerdy cataloguing endeavor in pop-music history. Founded by Stanford
alum Tim Westergren, a pianist and former film composer, the
Oakland-based project breaks down songs according to their component
traits, or genes, just as the Human Genome Project has mapped nature's
blueprints. "Genes collectively make a person tall or short, black or
white, fast or slow, with freckles or not," Westergren says. "It's kind
of like your building blocks -- and we think of this as the same thing
for music."

"Lose Yourself" thus has a gene describing whether the bass is played
ostinato or as a riff, and another for whether the kick drum sound is
tight or booming. There are genes for handclaps, turntable scratches,
and organ solos -- times 235. In fact, the four genres, or "genomes,"
these music analysts have scrutinized to date -- jazz,
hip-hop/electronic, rock/pop/country, and world music -- contain a total
of about four hundred genes. Some are genre-specific -- hip-hop, for
example, has no need of the jazz gene that counts improvised sax licks.

This is far from an academic exercise. As chief strategy officer of
Pandora Media, a company he created to oversee the project,  Westergren
is attempting no less than an egalitarian revolution in music marketing
-- one he believes can reach a vast, neglected cadre of fans who love
music but have aged out of the crate-digging demographic, or are
uninspired by MTV. Pandora's goal is to introduce these people to new
music based on what they already like, and while it's too early to draw
conclusions, the strong initial response to Pandora's unique product
suggests its effort, or something similar, could help transform a
recording industry battered by illegal downloading, flagging CD sales,
and listener ennui.

Westergren's idea was simple: Compile hundreds of thousands of songs
into a gigantic database that can match those you love with structurally
similar tracks, thereby creating the ultimate music-recommending device.
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http://www.eastbayexpress.com/Issues/2006-01-11/news/feature.html