Pandora Rocks! (Er.. Ghazals!)

Quite a long time back I had talked about a comparison of Rock v/s Ghazals. Obviously, they are NOT the same. Well the point was that Ghazals provide ready-made lyrics for anyone having trouble forming his or her Rock composition. Apart from that, we're talking separate universes, and I know that. Except for thematic connections. I mean, I think Rock's general theme matches those of Ghazals. Okay, so the Ghazaler is not hitting out (or throwing goat blood around) but essentially, he's the same guy, the man against the system. He’s like, the poorer cousin, the one who doesn’t have the guitar and is a rather emotional fellow, so goes out to the neighborhood bar and churns out his frustrations while enjoying a few drinks on the house. he feels the same, and consequently, writes the same.

Now, Pandora.com is a nice site wherein you feed their engine with an artist or song that you like, and they figure out music in their collection that matches the musical qualities of your artist/song. You can give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to songs that can help increasing the engine's precision. If you're the finical fellow, you can get to know exactly why a specific track was played ("We’re playing this track because it features pop rock qualities, repetitive melodic phrasing, extensive vamping, a clear focus on recording studio production and groove based composition."). As you can probably guess from that, it's quite accurate, and much, much, much better than conventional radio. I think it's the single most important conceptual innovation in the field of streaming music.

What I'd probably like is for them to consolidate with the already heavily-researched area of Music's connection with emotions and build unified algorithms to give me an interface that asks me just one question - "How do you want to feel today?"

Or, maybe they can change the question to something that does not remind people of Microsoft, because I figure they wouldn't want to.

It's quite intriguing, however, the effect of music on humans. Probably the day we figure out the exact neurons that are hit by exactly what type of music; maybe then we’d be experimentally able to prove my hypothesis correct. Also, maybe that day we’ll be able to prove exactly why songs such as this exist.