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Overview
Everyone loves music. But what is it that makes music so universally beloved and have such a powerful effect on us?
In this sweeping and authoritative book, Dr. Nolan Gasser—a composer, pianist, and musicologist, and the chief architect of the Music Genome Project, which powers Pandora Radio—breaks down what musical taste is, where it comes from, and what our favorite songs say about us.
Dr. Gasser delves into the science, psychology, and sociology that explains why humans love music so much; how our brains process music; and why you may love Queen but your best friend loves Kiss. He sheds light on why babies can clap along to rhythmic patterns and reveals the reason behind why different cultures around the globe identify the same kinds of music as happy, sad, or scary. Using easy-to-follow notated musical scores, Dr. Gasser teaches music fans how to become engaged listeners and provides them with the tools to enhance their musical preferences. He takes readers under the hood of their favorite genres—pop, rock, jazz, hip hop, electronica, world music, and classical—and covers songs from Taylor Swift to Led Zeppelin to Kendrick Lamar to Bill Evans to Beethoven, and through their work, Dr. Gasser introduces the musical concepts behind why you hum along, tap your foot, and feel deeply. Why You Like It will teach you how to follow the musical discourse happening within a song and thereby empower your musical taste, so you will never hear music the same way again.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250057204 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Flatiron Books |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2019 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 704 |
| Sales rank: | 461,080 |
| File size: | 50 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
NOLAN GASSER is a critically acclaimed composer, pianist, and musicologist. Most notably, he is the architect of Pandora Radio’s Music Genome Project and the chief musicologist from its founding in 2000. Dr. Gasser lectures widely on the nature of musical taste and the intersections of music, science, and culture. He received his Ph.D. in musicology from Stanford. He lives with his wife in Petaluma, California. Why You Like It is his first book.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE RISE AND REBIRTH OF THE SAVAGE BEAST
The Rise
In February 2000, I was up to my eyeballs in academic articles, preparing myself for the dreaded qualifying exams required to proceed unfettered into the dissertation phase of a PhD program. I was in my sixth year at Stanford University in the doctoral program in musicology, and had long before chosen my emphasis — polyphonic music of the Renaissance — and had even written a few chapters of my dissertation, a study on the relationship between sacred music and Marian devotion in Renaissance Milan (a fitting topic for a nice Jewish boy).
Then, in the midst of my ever-increasing anxiety, an email appeared in my in-box: "Wanted: Music analyst for a new music technology company."
Vaguely intrigued, I replied with my rough credentials to the anonymous sender:
Doctoral student in musicology at Stanford; professional pianist and composer, versed in all styles of classical and popular music ...
Fast-forward a month or so, and I found myself sitting down with Tim Westergren, one of three founders of a company later called Pandora Radio. Our meeting took place at the Coffee House on the Stanford campus, where Tim had been an undergraduate years before, earning a BA in political science, though likewise taking a few music courses. We discussed the current chaos in the music industry, the stranglehold that the major labels had on breaking and selling artists, and the potential of a database technology to codify musicological information. Several months prior, Tim had in fact held his own pivotal conversation with an old Stanford classmate, Jon Kraft — and, importantly, with Jon's longtime friend, Will Glaser. From it would ensue the birth of a company, Savage Beast Technologies.
Thorny Problems & Prescient Solutions
How that initial conversation, in November 1999, between Tim, Will, and Jon gave rise to a revolutionary music technology enterprise, then, requires a bit of back-story — most especially, on two of the three founders: Tim, the company's catalyst, who would become its public face; and Will, the behind-the-scenes product inventor and technologist who could turn it into a reality.
Tim Westergren's unlikely involvement in the birth of a tech start-up was — like so many historic endeavors before and since — built out of frustration and failure. He had been playing blues and rock piano since childhood, and in the years following his graduation from Stanford in 1988 had tried, unsuccessfully, to launch a series of acoustic-rock bands, as songwriter and pianist — most notably YellowWood Junction, once named San Francisco's "most promising un-signed band." Disillusioned by the road and the tribulations of the record business, by 1995 he switched to producing records, composing commercial jingles, and scoring independent movies — including the 1999 experimental drama The Last Best Sunday.
It was in this latter capacity that Tim gained a few key insights that would prove critical. Typically, a film director will try to coax a composer to a "cue" in a particular way by providing an existing sample recording (called a temp track) and adding commentary like "more relaxed" or "more scary" or "less sentimental," etc. As a film composer myself, I can say that this is generally a helpful technique — providing the composer with guidance toward the director's vision, while likewise inviting him to create something original. Yet, Tim made an entirely different observation: How, he wondered in some frustration, does music actually evoke such emotions as "relaxed," "scary," and "sentimental"? How does rhythm or harmony or instrumentation influence the experience of these attitudes? And — importantly — was there any way to develop a technology that could help connect them all?
In fateful serendipity, while these fanciful ideas were swimming in his head, Tim read an article in the New York Times — "What's a Record Exec to Do with Aimee Mann?" (July 11, 1999) — about the professional struggles of this celebrated but increasingly marginalized adult alternative singer-songwriter. The article noted the complex shifts in purchase habits and demographics taking place at this pivotal Y2K moment, brought on already by the distraction of the Internet and the high production value of music videos on MTV and VH1: "Young people today don't feel the need to own the music they listen to," the article concludes. The result was a music industry increasingly fixated on big-selling hit makers like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Ricky Martin, and the Backstreet Boys — with diminishing patience for distinctive, "artsy" figures like Aimee Mann.
But the article likewise places Mann's struggles at her own feet. After a few hits in the 1980s with the new wave band 'Til Tuesday (notably "Voices Carry"), Mann launched a solo career in 1993, gaining critical, though not much commercial, success; in the process, she fought with one label after another: "She's the model of an artist who has been chewed up and spit out by the music business ... But Aimee herself is a pain. She's not a good people person. She's never really allowed herself to be close to anyone at any record label," stated Dick Wingate, who originally signed 'Til Tuesday to Epic Records. Things reached a climax just as the article was penned, when her current label, Interscope Records, led by famed producer Jimmy Iovine, refused to release the album she'd been working on for three years because it had no "single," and unless Aimee wanted to be a "star," there was just no point — this despite the fact that her previous two albums had sold over 225,000 copies.
Reading this, Tim surely saw a tragic tale of a gifted but misunderstood artist who struggled to gain access to her own considerable fan base simply because she didn't "play the game," and instead had the audacity to strive for artistic excellence. As the article states, "The riddle of Mann's existence is that she wants respect from an industry that only rewards respect — and artistic freedom — to those who make it a lot of money." Doubtless too Tim saw a bit of himself in Mann's story, and his many years seeking recognition from an industry that was incapable of and uninterested in offering it to him. Together with his earlier musings on the mysterious sources of one's reaction to music, this spotlight on the plight of talented musicians to reach an audience went a long way in spawning the notion of a potential new enterprise.
But the article doesn't simply end with Mann's rejection; instead it closes on an upbeat and rather prescient note. Mann was able to buy back her master recordings from Interscope and release the album on her own label, SuperEgo, calling it Bachelor No. 2. Even more impactful on Tim's thinking was news that Mann had been contacted by Dick Wingate, now an executive at Liquid Audio, inviting her to sell the album's tracks directly to consumers as downloads; just a few months earlier, Liquid Audio had offered its first digital downloads via Amazon.com, which by 1999 had made online shopping more commonplace. Wingate states confidently, "This technology should encourage disenfranchised artists like Aimee ... to distribute their music the moment it's done. ... Artists want to communicate directly with their fans." Similar sites, such as MP3.com, were likewise gaining traction in the marketplace, leading Jonathan Van Meter, the author of the New York Times article, to conclude: "The paradigm is shifting."
One can imagine a proverbial flash going off in Tim's head as these disparate ideas coalesced: the prospect of a technology to help demystify music; the imperative to help struggling or "disenfranchised" artists connect with fans; and a growing paradigm shift in the music business brought on by digital technology. The time was certainly ripe for something innovative in the "music technology" space: Napster, the enfant terrible of the digital music era, had launched its peer-to-peer MP3 file-sharing service in June 1999 — at once turning a generation on to the art of downloading music from the Internet and marking the individual song, as opposed to the album, the primary focus of the musical experience. These were indeed the "Wild West" days in the music business.
The idea of launching a tech company to tackle arcane problems like music-fan matchmaking was by no means radical for folks living in the Bay Area in late 1999 — when the dot-com bubble was still inflating. Not knowing how exactly to go about it, however, Tim turned to his former Stanford pal, Jon Kraft — who years before had sold a company he founded, the Stanford Technology Group, to Ascential Software. Jon, in turn, thought of his friend — and former housemate in Menlo Park — Will Glaser. Jon's hunch to tap Will, it turns out, was spot-on.
In contrast to Tim, Will grew up in an environment where tackling thorny science-based problems with disruptive business-based solutions was practically routine. His father, Donald A. Glaser, was a professor of physics and molecular biology at UC Berkeley, who in 1960 won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Will had clearly inherited his dad's outsized ambition — such as when he became the first undergraduate at Cornell University to complete a triple major: in computer science, mathematics, and physics, graduating in 1988. Rather than pursue an academic career like his father, however, Will early on set out to tackle the business world. After working as an engineer at a few tech firms in the Bay Area, he founded his own in 1995, Hydra Systems — which built PC-based computers that could also run Apple software, something otherwise impossible at the time. He sold the company in 1997, at which point he became an in-demand tech consultant.
Indeed, both Jon and Will were active consultants in late 1999, relishing the good money and the lack of responsibility that otherwise came with running a company. Still, when Will received Jon's invitation to meet his friend Tim for a drink to discuss a potential business venture, Will accepted. Tim made his pitch: that the two of them help him start a company to solve the "music industry problem" by moving beyond genre to explore what truly defined each individual's taste. Will was skeptical, and yet the three continued the conversation at Will's San Francisco apartment. It was there that Tim offered an astute observation while reviewing Will's CD collection: seeing albums by Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, Tim opined that Will probably did not much like the guitarist Jeff Beck, as unlike Clapton and Keith Richards, Beck was inclined to complex, virtuosic solos; Tim continued: "I bet you also like Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, as he fits that more melodic Clapton/Richards mold." Will was now impressed, and more importantly, was prompted to pull out his trusty "Blue Binder"— his repository of random technology and innovation ideas that in moments of inspiration entered his mind, enough to warrant a quick summary, and perhaps a few mathematical calculations to suggest the prospect of further development. Most entries would never find their way into the real world, but with Tim's "trick," Will was reminded of an idea he had back in 1995. He called it the "Blockbuster Video Algorithm," which mused on how one might solve the common problem of how to recommend a video to someone based simply on aspects of the film. In essence, Will wanted to teach the computer to "comprehend" the myriad subtleties that underlie human preference toward a complex art form, in this case film: he spent days on the idea, developing the required mathematics, and forging the basis of a recommendation algorithm. And indeed, with some modifications, this "Binder" entry — an early notion of "Machine Learning" — in time became the approach upon which Tim, Will, and Jon built their new company.
Taking a big breath, that is, Will and Jon agreed to forego the luxury of their consulting careers to form this new music-based enterprise that Tim was advocating. Jon would handle the business duties, while Will would run technology and product development. Tim, with no tech or business background, would oversee marketing and, of course, music — though, fortunately for me, he would soon require help on the latter front. Jon dubbed the company Savage Beast Technologies (after a commonly misquoted line from William Congreve's 1697 play, The Mourning Bride: "Music has charms to soothe a savage breast"), powered by a technology that Will would, in short order, christen the Music Genome Project.
What's in a Name? Part 1
It is a true blessing of my professional life that the technology I helped to develop, the Music Genome Project (MGP), is rather famous — even among those who aren't technologically savvy. This is, however, an uncommon occurrence. While tech-based companies and products frequently become household names, the proprietary technologies that power them rarely do: Who has heard of Graph Search (Facebook), or PageRank (Google), or eBox (eBay) outside of a few technophiles and those who work at these firms? But things were always different with Savage Beast — as they still are with its latter-day namesake, Pandora Radio. From the beginning, the very soul of the company was entwined with the name of its technology — one with the added gravitas of being associated with perhaps the greatest scientific achievements of modern times: the Human Genome Project.
First conceived in the mid-1980s, the Human Genome Project was officially launched in 1990 with the aim of determining the DNA sequence of the entire human genome — and of mapping every individual gene of our species. As such, the expression "genome project" was in the air, so to speak, so it is thus not a surprise that Will — whose father had long been engaged, academically and commercially, in the field of molecular biology — would suggest it for his and Tim's fledgling company. After all, the goal of the technology was to "break down" music in a way that resembled how biologists "broke down" DNA — plus it sounded good.
As the architect of the music analysis protocol at Savage Beast, I would come to find great inspiration in its metaphoric association with the biological "genome" construct: that our complete and complex individual identity as humans could be defined by the distinctive "expression" that each of us registers upon the universal set of twenty-thousand-plus genes we all share.
Let the Games Begin
But such complex musings were still a ways off during that first encounter with Tim at the Stanford Coffee House in March 2000. Tim impressed me with his earnest passion for building a business based largely on music analysis, and I managed to do likewise with my displayed facility on a broad range of musical topics. Importantly, our conversation also had a strong moral component: perhaps it was possible, we dreamed in enthusiastic accord, that an intelligent, database-driven engine recommending music to average music lovers could break the stranglehold of the labels and "save" the music industry — why not? Tim, again, was an experienced musician, yet being largely self-taught, he needed someone with a thorough background in music analysis and a wide palette of musical knowledge to build out the Music Genome Project and help run the new company's music operation.
The company "office" at this point was a rented studio apartment in Will's building, in the Potrero Hill district of San Francisco, where a few days later I met Will and Jon, as well as three recent hires — a secretary, Adriana Ulloa, and two brilliant engineers, Jeff Stearns and Eric Bieschke, who would help Will design the software that underpins the technology. It was in this cramped space that Tim and Will unveiled to me the prototype of the Music Genome — an enhanced Excel spreadsheet with about fifty musical "genes" analyzing about seven hundred and fifty songs; the genes were, in truth, a bit naïve: tempo — fast to slow; harmony — major or minor; danceable — low to high, plus a bunch of instruments. "This is what we'd want you to help us develop," Tim explained with a wry smile. Glancing over the spreadsheet, I immediately knew this would be fun, and was entirely doable — though how exactly I couldn't say. I reminded Tim of the one hurdle I had to overcome before I could join his endeavor: a five-week trip to Milan to conduct research for my dissertation, starting in three days. "Not a problem," Tim said. "You can work on it while you're in Italy." The next day, while driving to pick up my passport, I got a call from Jon: "We'd like to offer you the job of vice president of music." While quietly wondering to myself who exactly the "president" of music might be, I took a deep breath at this exciting but unexpected shift in my career path, and simply said, "I'll take it."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Why You Like It"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Nolan Gasser.
Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: In the Ear of the Beholder
1. The Rise and Rebirth of the Savage Beast
PART ONE: A GIFT OF THE GODS
2. Under the Musical Hood: An Orientation
3. Melody: The Face of Music
Interlude A: The Evolution of Musical Taste—Music and Anthropology
PART TWO: BAR BANDS IN ANDROMEDA
4. Harmony: The Internal Body of Music
5. Rhythm: The Movement of Music
Interlude B: It's the Overtones, Stupid—Music, Math, and Physics
PART THREE: UNITY AND HETEROGENEITY
6. Form: The Shape of Music
7. Sound: The Personality of Music
Interlude C: The Singing Cerebrum—Music and the Brain
PART FOUR: Musical Metaphors
8. The Musical Genotype
9. The Pop Genotype
Interlude D: At the Cellular Level—Music and Cell Biology
PART FIVE: PARLEZ-VOUS GAMELAN?
10: The Rock Genotype
11: The Jazz Genotype
Interlude E: Listening with an Accent—Culture and Musical Taste
PART SIX: QUESTIONING THE OMNIVORE
12: The Hip Hop Genotype
13. The Electronic (EDM) Genotype
Interlude F: Staking Your Claim—Intraculture and Musical Taste
PART SEVEN: WHO ARE YOU, ANYWAY?
14. The World Music Genoptype
15. The Classical Genotype
Interlude G: Mind over Music—Psychology and Musical Taste
PART EIGHT: YOUR HIT PARADE
16. The What and Why of Musical Taste
Epilogue: Living with Music