I came across this site a few minutes ago and just had to tell you about it. Its called The Music Genome Project by an organisation
www.pandora.com and its a must for music lovers everywhere.
Key in the name of an artist and the system will play tracks along the same lines. Its like an intelligent jukebox, or having your own personal DJ. I've tried it with a couple of my favorite artists with some interesting results.
I tried Brian Eno and Everything But the Girl. ETBTG is a good example to try out as they have instrumental/light/ballad type music, plus more recently electronic dance music to their repertoire. The system picked up both music types and played tracks accordingly.
Related sites to check on this line is
www.Napster.co.uk who suggest music along the lines you are already playing, although this is done using a catalogue system, not intelligent analysis.
Definitely worth a look.....
This is what they say:
"On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.
Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.
Over the past 5 years, we've carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists - ranging from popular to obscure - and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.
It has been quite an adventure, you could say a little crazy - but now that we've created this extraordinary collection of music analysis, we think we can help be your guide as you explore your favorite parts of the music universe."