The smell of the changing leaves, the first drops of rain, the crisp cool air, the sweaters, the dying leaves that were once such resplendent colors, and the anticipation of the coming snow, autumn represents a time of change, freshness, and a shift in the seasons. Also, some of the best, most ingrained memories of our lives come from the next few months: the memories of summer, the gathering in of families, and of harvest.

Whether it's the changing of foliage or whatever nostalgic association you may have with this time of year, this mixtape of songs (old and new) hopes to create the perfect channel for you to indulge all these feelings and to enjoy throughout the season. Celebrate the turning of the season with "Harvest Time". Enjoy!!

--- Michelle S.
(assistant music curator)

(photograph by David Paul Ohmer)

You're soaking in it!

Music is streaming around you right now in the air. Music is, after all, something that we can encode into small pieces and send out riding on any sort of wave (AM, FM, Wi-Fi, Photons, whatever... gravity?) to something that can reconstruct those bits into movement of the air pressure near your ears - your ears will perceive the music.


We've already come a long way: only a few hundred years ago somebody would have to physically play an instrument near you for you to hear it... People started a system of writing music on paper, the first encoding: a piece of music could be sent to another location and then played, albeit still by a person with an instrument. It wasn't until the late 19th century that someday got the bright idea to record the actual changes in air pressure that were being produced by the player. Then they could use their recording to change the air pressure in another location and the sound would be reproduced.

Where did the sound go to? Mostly speakers. They can move the air. Then we got small ones, right next to our ears. Oh wait, we could actually make them smaller and stick them right in our ears. Waves don't need to be very strong if they're right next to the ear drum.


But that earbud needs to be getting its signal from somewhere. Right now we're hooked into the relatively bulky digital-to-audio converters, like our computers or phones or iPods. These guys are taking the bits and converting them to voltages that are used to move the air near our ears by the earbuds. What if we get the earbuds themselves to be the D-to-A converters, picking up the radio streams in the air? I guess we'd have to program them to pick up certain stations we like... or be in charge of sending our own (potentially encrypted) music from our own hard-copy collection somewhere else in the world, or maybe pick up Pandora on that promised ubiquitous wi-fi cloud covering the entire earth.


What If...

The problem is, I hate earbuds. They get uncomfortable. How about just implanting the antenna into your earlobe, like an earring? Run the wire to a small flat speaker grid inside your ear canal. Permanent music, all you have to do is turn it on and you have your personal music right inside your ear.


Well, one thing that earbuds do that this won't is isolation. A little speaker grid in your ear canal is a nice energy efficient way of moving the air near your eardrum, but other sounds can come right in too... What if we bypass the whole airwave thing, everything we've based music on up till now---we're just recreating it with voltages anyway: let's run a wire straight to the cochlear nerve. You could control exactly how much of the outside world you hear, how much of the music stream.


...we should probably encode the controls on the back of your ear to accept only your own finger! Otherwise a nice lover's caress might end up being deafening.


...Of course, 5ally is already bored, looking into the next step, bypassing the hardware altogether: It involves music modulated directly onto her brainwaves.

--- jonathan
(listener advocate)

First I clean it up and then pow! -- a week later I'm cleaning all over again. Yeah I'm a neat-freak, so what?!?

Luckily for the the Dust Brothers, their music was just as prevalent throughout the 1990s. They started with several hits for Tone Loc and Young MC that featured heavy sampled drums, gritty electric riffs, and simple to the point raps. However, they really made their name with the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique -- a meticulously through-composed work that ranks as one of the best produced albums of all time.

Moving past the history lesson, let's get to the music -- specifically the musical connections between the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique and Beck's Midnite Vultures. Sure, both clearly feature the Dust Brothers' signature bangin' acoustic beats, dramatic song structure and thoughtful sequencing, but what is so striking is how well they propelled these quirky underground stars into the limelight. Is it because their productions are so strong we don't notice the silly off-the-wall lyrics (check out Beck's lyrics to Mixed Business for a good example)? Are the grooves so deep we can't help but be pulled into the world of Beck and the Boys? A bit of both perhaps?

Without a doubt the Dust Brothers' production style set the stage for artists like the Chemical Brothers, Moby, and the whole world of big beat and funky breakbeat with their gritty sampled drums, funky bass/guitar lines, freakish analog synth stabs, and soulful hooks. But perhaps it's something a bit larger than the musical elements alone. Maybe it's how their productions married the disparate personalities of these artists into a cohesive whole.

Perhaps it's because both of these albums have a ridiculous amount of Soul; yes that's Soul with a capitol S. I think so. Similar to when a cook puts that extra bit of love in the gravy the Dust Brothers put a whole lot of Soul in these two albums, and it shows.

--- Chris
Senior Music Analyst

There's nothing like getting a raucous scare from music. Unless it's doubled with a good scare in a movie. For me it really hasn't gotten much creepier than The Shining's opening scene. And it all starts with the incredibly sinister music of the brilliant Wendy Carlos. An otherwise lovely scenic drive through the mountains is made ominous with Wendy's creeeeepy score, instantly foretelling the nightmare that will descend in the next few hours. This post is about scary music in drama, all of which can be heard on the jarring classical mixtape "Haunt Your House", created by Russell Johnson and me here at Pandora ...

From Weird to Creepy: Switched From Bach

Analog synth sounds are famous for being weird, so it's barely a skip over to 'creepy' for them. Wendy Carlos had already created a smorgasbord of curious Moog synth sounds on her landmark, genre-bending album Switched-on Bach. Apparently back in '68, classical had to be Mooged in order to really sell: An all-Moog Bach album, it was the first classical LP to go platinum. Bach's style is often dominated by counterpoint: the compositional technique of having 2 or more melodic lines going at once. If instruments were voices, a Bach fugue would sound like 2-5 people blabbering away at the same time. So hearing a gaggle of funky Moog sounds executing a contrapuntal Bach piece makes for some very entertaining, often silly musical conversations. She also Mooged Beethoven in A Clockwork Orange.

From there it was just a hop over to full-blown creepland:

Let The Weird Do The Work

I imagine Wendy Carlos toiled to find just the right synth sounds to achieve her desired creep factor. But disturbing music can seem effortless to create: witness the soundtrack to the classic 1976 psychotic thriller Carrie. The fire roasting the school is properly demonized with a few simple, very crunchy synth layers on "School in Flames", the first of 2 Carrie tracks on the mixtape. And on "At The Prom", the strings are trying to stay pretty (and normal) when, finally, they veer off the rails and snap into dissonance, obviously at the moment Carrie's switch is flipped into mass murder-mode.

Weird Old Music

In summary, and as usual, strange is defined by the unusual: weird sounds (synths), and weird harmony; i.e. dissonance. Before movies, when ballets and operas carried a lot of the dramatic programming of the day, disturbance was defined with dissonance. At the notorious premiere of the composer Igor Stravinsky's 1913 ballet The Rite Of Spring, the audience threw a full fit- and why? Coupled with the horrific plot of a young girl who dances herself to death for a sacrifice, it was probably the rather unprecedented magnitude of strangeness they witnessed in the music. In describing the work's harmony, Leonard Bernstein said that even by today's standards it's "...got the best dissonances anyone ever thought up". It also has, he continued, "the best asymmetries and polytonalities and polyrhythms": their cultural foreignness to the audience at the time probably fueled the agitation.

And then it's got the bassoon (hear it featured by Prokofiev here). Before 'weird' was defined by synthesizers & electronics, people relied on the unusual use of acoustic sounds. Albeit beautiful in other circumstances, the bassoon is an instrument with tremendous strange-potential- Stravinsky employed its funny-sounding low register prominently in Rite's score. So the combination of all-of-the-above in full glory inspired the initial audience to riot- not a bad beginning to a decent horror flick in itself.

To hear these pieces in full, amidst hours more of the dark and disturbing, listen to the curated station (mixtape) "Haunt Your House"

And to hear a Halloween mixtape that's loaded with tons of rock, kooky rock, punk, grit, witches, monsters, ghosts, angst and candy, listen to the mixtape "Halloween", jointly created by a bunch of staffers here at Pandora.

Enjoy!

--- Michelle
(music analyst)

With our new release we've added a sharing toolbar above the player so you're always just a click away from sharing a song or a station with your friends on Facebook and Twitter. The first time you share on one of these networks, you'll have to go through a series of pages that will connect your Pandora account with your Twitter or Facebook account. After that, it's a just a simple click to share. When you post songs to Facebook your friends will be able to listen to samples right in their news feed. On Twitter we'll post a shortened link to a page featuring just the song or station you shared.

This release also brings our station gifting feature to the foreground for the first time. Click the little present icon in the sharing toolbar and we'll take you to a page where you can create an entirely new station to "give" to a friend. We'll send it along to them in a fancy email, kind of like an electronic greeting card -- or maybe more precisely, like a modern version of the mixtape.

Have fun playing with these new sharing features. Can't wait to see what you discover...

Tom
CTO @ Pandora

PS: want to see what other people are finding and posting to Twitter? Try using this Twitter search link.

Just in time for All Hallow's Eve, our resident Scare Queen (and senior classical music analyst) Michelle Alexander looks at some of the scariest music ever written, ranging from the ominous organ music of Bach and Beethoven's stormy symphonic pieces through Liszt's violent piano hammering and then into the creeping atonality of 20th Century composers like George Crumb and Gyorgy Ligeti. She thrusts her hands into the muck of musical fright and dredges up the dissonance and challenged expectations that make for aural horror. (9 mins.)

For the full story, check out the musical samples and a mixtape made especially for trick-or-treaters.

--- Kevin
(executive producer)

In the comments to my previous post, a commenter wrote (in a long and very well-reasoned comment) that the craft of popular music from Tin Pan Alley and the American songbook "remains unquestionably the model to which all future song writing must be compared."

Believe it or not, this made me think about punk rock. Here's how.

Let's Not Talk About Forever

The idea that any kind of song writing will ever be "unquestionably the model to which all future song writing must be compared" is hyperbolic. Forever is a long time, and to say that people in 200 years, or 2,000 years, or 12,000 years will look ONLY to Tin Pan Alley for the ultimate in song writing standards is at best impossible to confirm.

At worst, it projects our beliefs onto the people of the future, presuming that they will not only understand everything better than we do, but that they will select what we value and confirm its ultimate superiority. In other words, it's a fantasy.

Rowdy Grandkids

The clear musical differences between Tin Pan Alley songs and punk rock songs should not lead us to conclude that that there is no connection to be made. The story of how music went from Tin Pan Alley to CBGB's is a story about the fundamental connection between peoples' values and the music they admire, and between music and philosophy.

There's More to Music than the Music

When the punk rockers considered the world in which they came of age, they were appalled and angry; and, fairly or not, they blamed the bleakness of their world on the values that created it. As they took aim at the orthodoxy of Post-WWII American values, they did so in terms of the popular music of that time, believing that in attacking the values of the music (expertise, division of labor, graceful individual conformity to social mores and roles, and the fetishization of musicality itself), they would expose the failures of American values at large.

But punk's attack didn't use musical excellence as its main weapon, it did the opposite, using musical impoverishment to dramatize an idea: the idea that pretty music can cover up some pretty ugly things. The musical excellence of the American Songbook was never something that punk music questioned or even criticized.

Punk questioned the value of Tin Pan Alley's embrace of form and beauty, in light of the world as it was in the mid-70's. By doing so, punk music insisted that the most important dimensions of music were not its formal and expressive ones (the craft, so highly valued by Tin Pan Alley); they were the ethical and ritual ones.

My Way

Punk music's emphasis on the ethical dimension of music and Tin Pan Alley's expression of music as a craft are both valid as aspects of a musical style; but to exclusive fans of one genre or the other, both genres cannot be considered good music.

If you really believe, as the listener above does, that the American Songbook is the standard by which all future songs will be judged, then punk rock's abandonment of musicality makes its excellence as music impossible. And yet, to many, punk rock is the real music, and American standards are fake, silly, elitist, authoritarian, and so on.

So it seems that to really like a style of music is to believe something, to make a philosophical claim, to make the unavoidable connection between a music's characteristics, and the values which those characteristics represent.

As a listener and as someone who makes records, I can't say that I know how this happens, or why, but I for one am glad it does. This is a part of the strange force that music, the mysterious art, brings to bear.

---Michael
(music curator)

ps - I love both of these kinds of music.

If you are not quite ready for the summer to be over yet, then dip into this set from the Blazed And Confused tour that Slightly Stoopid co-headlined with Snoop Dogg a few months ago.

"Runnin' With A Gun"

"Officer"

"Closer To The Sun"

"GZ And Hustlas" (with Snoop Dogg, coming later this week)

With "Closer To The Sun" and "GZ And Hustlas," please bear in mind that they are intended for mature audiences only. Both contain profanity and are NSFW. The first two songs, however, are clean.

--- Kevin
(executive producer)

Here's part two of our Improv show, in which we explore directed improvisation and how musicians support each other when they're out on the sea of spontaneity: Guitarist Lebo from ALO (a.k.a. Animal Liberation Orchestra), pianist Trevor Garrod from Tea Leaf Green (pictured here), and guitarist Jeremy Korpas from Big Light.

Recorded and edited by Tyler Brown at Bellboy Recording in Richmond CA. "The Musicology Show" is a free podcast subscription in iTunes and other RSS readers. (11 mins.)

In simple terms this is the foundation of the mash-up, a technique that has been at work in popular music ever since DJs starting blending & manipulating records in the 1970's. It has certainly become a popular sub genre of it's own.

While it is endlessly entertaining to explore ways to combine rock, rap, 80's synth pop, swing, jazz, r&b, dancehall, bhangra...I would like to dig a little deeper into how the mash-up of musical conventions within electronic/dance is creating some compelling new sub-genres. Let's start with dubstep.

Dance culture in the UK has long been fascinated with reggae/dub, garage, grime, drum & bass, and techno. Put all these together and you get music that is characterized by dark textures (grime), slow tempos (around 70 bpm), deep electro bass lines (drum & bass & garage), and glitchy sounds & patterns (techno), with a reggae/dub feel. Often the rhythmic patterns created with the use of delay, echo & reverb in reggae are expressed with actual percussion, samples, and instrumentation in dubstep. Syncopation dominates, but is anchored by strong downbeats. Electronic, spaced out timbres (remember Trip Hop?) and synth sounds are quite common as well. If I had to break this down to a simple formula it would look something like this:

(grime/garage + techno) x reggae/dub = dubstep

Burial, Mary-Anne Hobbs, Distance, Bassnectar, Joker, Martyn, Skream, Caspa, Rusko, Kode9 are some good artists to check out if you're interested in exploring the sound of dubstep. For some further reference and insight:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jun/12/guido-joker-gemmy-purple-bristol
http://www.urb.com/features/41/CallingforReinforcements.php
http://www.xlr8r.com/tv/25
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A10695684

And, we do have our very own Dubstep genre station here on Pandora.

Stay tuned for the mash-up profiles on Baile Funk, Bmore/Ghetto Tech, and Indie Dance/Nu Disco.

--- Addi
Dance Collection Manager

"So High So Low"

"Thunder"

"I Will Be Light"

"One Day"

--- Kevin
(executive producer)

The Problem with Song Lyrics

As a songwriter, I think of song lyrics as a specialization within creative writing. Unlike other kinds of creative writing, song lyrics can be excellent even when the writing (taken on its own) isn't particularly good. It's a feel you have to have, it's a sort of creative half-writing. It's leaving things out. It's a kind of writing which in some ways is more like conversation than literature.

This is pretty apparent when you take a lyric out of the context of its song. On the page or read out loud, a song lyric will rarely work. The music, too, generally depends on the presence of the lyric to have its full effect.

Separated from each other, the elements of a song usually fall shy of what we consider true literature or music.

The Conundrum

Now obviously, I believe that songs are the equal of any other art form. I write them, after all. But exactly how such excellence is fashioned from such humble materials - the alchemical quality of songs - is hard to see. It is perhaps the central mystery and attraction of songwriting, and it is of perennial fascination to me.

It's not essential to understand these things in order to do them well, and it's surely not possible to ever fully understand them, but it can't hurt to try; and yesterday I came across a quote that may just offer a missing piece of the puzzle. It's from What is Music: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Music," by Philip Alperson, and it says:

""emotion" can, in effect, be defined as what music articulates, much as "reality" can be best defined as that which the concepts and grammars of languages can capture."

The idea is that, just as the discovery of a mathematical order in music led to larger ideas about a mathematically ordered universe; it was music that enabled us to discover, perceive, understand and differentiate our emotional states. At least in the beginning, music may have functioned as a kind of emotional mirror, reflecting back to us our feelings so we could see them more clearly. In the process, it allowed us to name those feelings.

This suggests that without music, we might not know the difference between, say, fondness and love, or anger and hatred. A radical notion, to say the least, and one with something to say about songs as well.

Song Lyrics Only Point the Way

How does this play out in the real world? Well my favorite example for this, and a lyric I think about frequently, is by the great Brian Wilson:

I may not always love you
but long as there are stars above you
you never need to doubt it
I'll make you so sure about it

As creative writing, this reads more like a Hallmark card than anything else; and yet it's one of the best song lyrics I can think of. The melody, especially in the last line when he sings "SURE about it," is so purely, fully expressive of the meaning of the words that it seems impossible to imagine how those words could be improved.

In fact, better writing, in the sense of writing that stands on its own, would probably divide the listener's focus, and thus paradoxically actually be worse writing.

Put that in your sandbox and smoke it. And maybe listen to God Only Knows Radio while you do.

--Michael
(music curator)