It’s funny that I started this blog intending to write a lot of fiction, but I’ve ended up writing more about music than anything else. I guess it’s easy to talk about, and it’s always on my mind. Right now I’m copying some music from Nightwish and Leaves’ Eyes onto my iPod. My friend Kent owns the albums, so I’m going to give them a listen. While I wait for the music to copy, I thought I’d quickly write about something really cool: Pandora Podcasts.
If you’ve never heard of Pandora.com before, you should visit their site. I have a link to it in my sidebar on the right. Pandora.com is an internet radio Web site where you can create your own radio stations that play only music you’re interested in. They have analyzed thousands of songs (possibly closer to a million songs, for all I know) and assigned a set of musical attributes to each one, and their stations only play songs that have the same musical attributes as the songs you use to set up your station. You can make some pretty interesting combinations or choose to keep your stations as narrowly defined as you like, and you can set up multiple stations. Pretty cool, huh?
Well, Pandora.com also puts out a series of Podcasts where they talk about what goes into making music. Yesterday I listened to three of their Podcasts: Drums and Drumming, Singing Intervals, and Hip Hop Rhyme Schemes. It’s pretty interesting stuff. You can download the Podcasts from the iTunes Music Store or from blog.pandora.com/podcasts.