The Complainer: Pandora

People are always going on about artificial intelligence, but I'd personally be more interested in hearing what kind of music AI would write. Almost all of our response to music is based on emotion, and even the most mechanical, precise, and sterile electronic music provokes some response other than intellectual fascination. Would music created by AI appeal to humans on any level?? Would it even sound like music to us??

I bring this up because Pandora attempts to reduce music down to its scientific components and then recommend music to you based on that. Unfortunately, music is not chemistry, so where two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen will always make water, "electric rock instrumentation" and "minor key tonality" can create, apparently, 'Mushroom' by Can and--I kid you not--'Once Upon A Time In The West' by the Dire Straits. Apparently, 'Debaser' by the Pixies and 'God Save The Queen' by the Sex Pistols share similar music/molecular components, too.

To be fair, that last set of songs sound vaguely similar, but you'll never see any human comparing the two in any way. They come from different motivations and different aesthetic sensibilities, and conjure up different emotional resonances in the listener. What, then, to make of a band that radically changes sounds from album to album?? I had enough problems with Animal Collective, because Pandora played 'Leaf House' and then found stuff similar to its strange, skewed folk (giving me a TV On the Radio track that is vocal focused, a Devendra Banhart psych-folk nugget, and finally a Magnetic Fields song...which I heard 5 seconds of before Pandora tried to get me to register) while most of the band's music is more electric and layered. I can't even imagine what would happen if I put Beck in.

Now, I realize that Pandora is free. And it does help people find new music. But even if you go by 'song' instead of 'artist', it'll turn up weird results like those mentioned above. Hey, I like the Magnetic Fields just fine, but they don't sound anything like the Animal Collective. This is what happens when we let science determine what music is made up of. Pandora is great, like so much science, in theory, but in actual use and trials it fails completely.