Harmony is meant to correct any discord which may have arisen in the courses of the soul... rhythm too was given for the same reason... ---Plato

It is by the Odes that a man's mind is aroused, by the rules of ritual that his character is established, and by music that he is perfected. . . . ---Confucius

The Culinary Metaphor Pt. 1: Music and Nutrition

In my previous post I wrote about using food metaphors as a kind of oblique strategy for discussing music. Let's get more specific, to explore the method to this madness. Today's angle: nutrition.

Music: Nourishment and Poison

The American Heritage Dictionary defines nutrition as "the process of nourishing or being nourished, especially the process by which a living organism assimilates food and uses it for growth and for replacement of tissue."

Plato and Confucius would have liked that. For them, music existed to guide and improve human beings, and the right and wrong musics created good and bad people, respectively. Medieval musical thinkers and composers avoided the tritone (the augmented fourth interval) because many thought it to be of Satanic and therefore dangerous origin. And in the 1980's, Tipper Gore's PMRC based their campaign to place parental warning labels on recordings on the idea that it is necessary to "protect" listeners from certain kinds of music.

It is important to celebrate the springboard of the weekend... Friday! Not only do Fridays complete our work week, they are manifestations of our own unique mini-vacations. From partying to relaxing, we all have our own way of enjoying our much deserved days off from reality.

In this mix you will find a range of songs that all have a common ground of inspiration. Connecting us with friends, love, good vibes and freedom, Friday is the universal day that we long for each and every week.

The goal is to keep you out late. Meet that someone special. Let loose on the dance floor. Reconnect with old friends and reminisce in the midst of creating new memories. Roll down your car windows and turn up the volume. Turn off the tube, put your feet up, and do your thing. Just make sure your weekend is memorable!

--- Daniel J. Craig
(music operations, ripper)

Is There an Animal in your Band Name?

Enjoy!

--- Michael
(music curator)

The term baile funk was used originally to describe a type of dance party that started happening in the favelas (ghettos) of Rio in the 70's. Funk, r&b, and soul music being produced by American artists like George Clinton, James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye and Isaac Hayes had a strong voice with the people who populated the favelas. This music not only had relevant social messages, but grooves that were explicitly crafted for dancing.

I think everyone should have a walk-up song (now batting...), even if it rarely gets used. I also like to think that if the right song is played at the right moment, it can actually influence the outcome of the game. While this is debatable, the significant role that music plays in the modern arena or coliseum is not... for better or worse.

This collection delivers all your standard coliseum anthems, along with a nice stack of other, relatively unknown gems. While the music represents a wide variety of musical styles -- including rap, rock, punk, metal, funk, film score, and electronic/dance -- they all have one thing in common: energy.

Recommended for play while: tailgating, applying paint to your face and/or body, getting pumped to deliver a presentation at work, entertaining during the holidays while sports are on TV, stuck in traffic trying to get to the game, in the locker room prior to a big matchup, performing a victory dance, clapping in unison, playing dunk hoops on a 6 foot rim, working off the calories from aforementioned tailgate, and any situation that requires an elevated state of personal or team mojo.

For best results, play at a high volume on big speakers.

--- Addi
(dance collection manager)

--- Kevin
(executive producer)

Our first video guest is Andy Z. His fanciful cartoons about multi-culturalism, language, animals and peace are a great start into our catalog of tunes that your kids will love. He performed these songs live in the former Pandora HQ on 22nd Street. From each video page, the right-hand paragraph includes a link to an Andy Z station based on that song.

"Sticky Bubble Gum"

"The Pirate Song"

"Scarecrow"

"I Went To A Party With Dinosaurs"

--- Kevin
(executive producer)

Competitive Eating?

It's hard to judge music, but I have to. It's a necessary part of things for me. As those of you who have read my previous posts (here, here or here, for example) know, to be consistent when doing so may be impossible.

When I'm writing my own songs or making records, it's at least possible to be definitive. I just have to do stuff that I believe in. Not easy, but possible. As Pandora's music curator, though, it's a whole different thing. I have to maintain a sense of aesthetics in general; a sense of musical quality that goes beyond my own opinions and tastes.

It's a narrow path to walk.

On one side there is a kind of musical moralism which says: "this is good and that is bad; and therefore you should listen to this and not that." On the other side is what you might call musical sociopathy, with its relativistic axiom: "there is no such thing as musical quality; everything is equally good."

I don't relate to either of those points of view at all, and I don't want to.

Top Chef

Happily, though, I've found a strategy that is just imprecise enough to filter out esoteric pitfalls while allowing for some ideas to get through: I talk about music as if it's food.

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!

--- Daniel J. Craig
(music operations, ripper)

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)

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