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Papercut and colored pencil art by Sheryl Aronson X 5

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Pandora Internet Radio

I have recently discovered Pandora internet radio.  I will try to describe it.  You can bring it up on any internet connected device. The opening screen asks for the name of a musical artist/group or a song.  Then it creates a 'radio station' with that artist/song, and others that it thinks are similar. For instance, I just put in 'Den', and clicked on 'John Denver' in the suggestion list.  (With each letter you put in, it gives a list of suggestions, as you add more letters of the name, the suggestions get closer and closer until the name you are looking for appears.)  Right now I am listening to Jim Croce's 'I Got a Name', one of the songs Pandora picked as similar to John Denver.  I agree with almost all the songs Pandora has chosen for me.  I am rediscovering songs I had forgotten, and also discovering new songs and artists that I like that I never knew about.  
With each song that Pandora chooses for you, you can pause, skip, bookmark, or designate if you liked it or didn't like it.  That way, if it chooses something you especially like, it will use that song to find others, and if you didn't like a song or artist, it will steer away from them. We just listen to the free version of Pandora, which interrupts the music every 10 songs or so with a commercial for upgrading to the paid interruption free version for $36/year.  Pandora saves each 'radio station' you create, so when you return, you can either have it create a new station, or you can listen to the same one.
A couple of days ago, I had alot of Fibro skin pain, and I wanted to meditate to calm it down.  I wanted classical guitar to listen to, but did not know any artists or songs to start the process.  I went to Pandora, and put in 'guitar'.  I tried out a couple of their suggestions, and found 'Dueling Guitars", which was the kind of music I wanted.  At their website, I just found a page that allows you to designate a genre.


I went to Pandora.com, and found some info about it:
Since we started back in 2000, we have been hard at work on the Music Genome Project. It's the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken.
Together our team of musician-analysts has been listening to music, one song at a time, studying and collecting literally hundreds of musical details on every track - melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics ... and more! We continue this work every day to keep up with the incredible flow of great new music coming from studios, stadiums and garages around the country.
Music has been shown to be very therapeutic.  It can change your mood, and make you feel better emotionally and physically.  Check out Pandora.  Find music that will both suit you and soothe you.  Just one recommendation:  If you need to get any work done, either listen to instrumental music, or don't listen to Pandora.  This was not going to be my topic today, but I kept getting drawn into the songs, and could not focus to write coherently on my other topic.   

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