music from cats

[calimac]

I have a cat named Pandora, and recently I decided to check out the Internet music-playing site named Pandora. You can choose from a number of pre-set "genre" stations or "create" your own based on a performer or (in classical) a composer, or an individual work. If the performer/composer is in the database, the system will play a work by that person every 5-6 offerings, and the rest will be whatever it thinks is "like" it.

Its classical offerings are still more than a little sketchy, and I'm not quite sure what I'm going to get when I request a station with music "like" a given composer. I asked for a station based on Sibelius, only to find that, though he's in the index, they have no Sibelius in their database, and what it thought was "like" Sibelius was 19th-century symphonism pretty much indistinguishable from the Romantic Symphonic genre station. To get tonal 20th century symphonic music, I had to make a station based on Prokofiev, but the only actual Prokofiev they have seems to be one recording of Romeo and Juliet. I get a better selection of Shostakovich from this than from a Shostakovich station, which tends to play a Shostakovich quartet movement followed by half a dozen quartet movements by other composers (Bartok, Debussy), then a Shostakovich violin concerto movement followed by half a dozen violin concerto movements by other composers, and so on.

The Classical Symphonic genre station plays early Haydn, but is excessively fond of slow movements. Its tastes in Mozart runs to dance sets. Otherwise: Boccherini, Gossec, Kraus, the usual; mostly slow movements again.

It does a little better in non-classical. Asking for a Steeleye Span station produced a stunning cover of "Byker Hill" by a Cape Breton group called the Cottars new to me. Asking for a Roches station got some of the Roches' own livelier songs paired with a lot of gloomy singer-songwriter stuff by other people. Rufus Wainwright's cover of "Hallelujah", but nowhere on any of the clickable information links does the name "Leonard Cohen" appear, though he, like, wrote the song. Weird.

Anyway, it keeps me company while I slave away on a mentally taxing computer project.

Comments

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

I hope not toooo "mentally taxing". We wouldn't want you taxed right out of capacity.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

I really like Pandora, even though their selections are more limited than my taste. They're adding music all the time; they used to have almost no world music, for example.