The DNA of REM

There was a time when what defined my first impression about a person was the answer to this question: what kind of music do you like? Elitist did not begin to describe how seriously I took that question. Snob was more on the nose. If your answer was “everything,” you were dead to me. I instantly forgot you were even standing there and would often accidentally bump into people who answered “everything.” I sat on a girl once for the same reason. Many months later and after weeks in court we settled it like gentlemen. We Jell-O wrestled. I lost the match and my appetite for Jell-O forever.

Only slightly less egregious than “everything” was “everything but rap and country.” To me that said “I have taste, but very little.” I also thought those people must be the ones who ordered their steaks well done and considered katsup a steak sauce.

Coming up next in my countdown of bad answers, in a two way tie for third, you guessed it, “rap” or “country.” The reason I only slightly disliked people with these responses was that I gave them points for sticking to a genre. At least they knew what they liked. They didn’t like “everything,” just bad music.

My answer? I’d rattle off a few bands that I liked at the time, or I’d try to classify my tastes: I’d say alternative, grunge, emo… whatever genre I thought represented artists I liked. This method was archaic at best. What did alternative mean? If it was the alternative to mainstream rock then it shouldn’t have been on MTV or the radio, but it was. Was grunge limited to only mid-nineties Seattle artists, or was there a sound that any band could create to be considered grunge? Was Weezer emo? Could emo bands have female singers? Does Ann Coulter have an Adam’s apple? What it boiled down to was that this method didn’t describe what I liked about a song, a band or a style of music.

Thank the maker for the internet, whose mysterious artificial intelligence has decoded man’s emotional response to music. Soon the robots will assimilate this program and will try to create music. It will be the most beautiful music any mortal will have ever heard. Until then we have the Music Genome Project. It may sound like a secret government program to genetically engineer a boy band/ superhero team, but I assure you it is probably not that. I’m seventy four percent sure it is not. The project began in 2000 as an attempt to dissect the DNA of music.

Every song has a “vector,” a list of its genes. Things like the singer’s gender, the level of distortion on the guitar and type of background vocals make up the approximately 150 “genes” of a song. There are over four hundred possible genes, though some genres have more than others. Rock songs deal with only around 150 genes but rap uses over 300. Jazz has 400 different genes because, well, jazz is chaotic crap. Listening to jazz makes me want to puncture my eardrums with a yellow number two pencil. It’s like when your alarm clock goes while you’re still asleep, so the alarm is making everything in your dream go crazy and start having a panic attack. That’s what jazz sounds like to me– a panic attack in my dream.

But back to vectors. A complex algorithm called the distance function compares vectors to generate a list of similar songs. (Pay attention, there will be a quiz on this Monday.) The Music Genome Project’s music player application, Pandora (Pandora.com) is free and lets you create custom playlists based on an artist or song. I have a few for my favorite artists, but most interesting are the stations I made based on a single song. I usually like one song by an artist and nothing else they’ve made, but Pandora never fails to pull a rabbit out of her hat.

So now ask me what kind of music I like and I’ll answer with a more scientific and most importantly more accurate response: I like songs that feature basic rock song structure, major key tonality, a distinctive male lead vocal and mild rhythmic syncopation. I also don’t mind string section beds, subtle use of acoustic piano or vocal-centric aesthetics. How about you? Oh… rap and country. That’s cool.