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.

Enjoy!

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.

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:

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

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.

"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."