Note to users. If you're seeing this message, it means that your browser cannot find this page's style/presentation instructions -- or possibly that you are using a browser that does not support current Web standards. Find out more about why this message is appearing, and what you can do to make your experience of our site the best it can be.

Science 3 March 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5765, p. 1223
DOI: 10.1126/science.311.5765.1223d
Prev | Table of Contents | Next

Random Samples

If a band member is like an organ, contributing to the functioning of the whole body, what are the different sounds the band produces? Tim Westergren calls them genes. He's the brain behind the Music Genome Project, designed to "capture the details that collectively describe a piece of music, the same way the genome does for a person."

Westergren and some 30 fellow music enthusiasts run a company called Pandora, which analyzes songs according to features, or "genes," such as instrumentation, lyrics, beat, mood, and type of harmony. So far, they've cataloged about 400 genes, each with different forms: Voice, for instance, has 30 different "alleles," from urban to sultry. When a visitor to the Web site (www.pandora.com) enters the name of a song, an algorithm runs through all the genomes in the database and creates a playlist of "relatives."

The project is "a cute strategy" for analyzing music, says genomicist Elliott Margulies of the National Human Genome Research Institute (who is also the keyboard player in a rock band). "It's like looking at human variation or primate evolution; they're trying to analyze the same genes to look at the variation within music."

Westergren says users are sometimes surprised: They'll input a favorite song--say, a mellow Sarah McLachlan tune--and Pandora will come back with a pop hit by Britney Spears. Some people don't like being reminded that humans are related to monkeys either, but the genes don't lie.




To Advertise     Find Products

Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)