on
the Tree of Life
we looked for visualisations of
any lifebranch's
virtual soundtrack
but found only
contingency
because the musical and visual toolkits
are constrained
by archaic invented instruments
Pandora.com
pays musicians to characterise songs
using a set of tags
that could theoretically be assigned
by an AI
('quality' is entirely omitted
as subjective)
"modal harmonies"
"chordal patterning"
"melodic part-writing"
"rhythmic syncopation"
"major/minor/mixed key tonality"
"repetitive/meandering melodic phrasing"
"extensive vamping"
"acoustic/synthetic sonority"
"light swing groove"
in listening to the 'radio channels'
generated by subsets of these tags
one notices that genius doesn't rate
kate-bush-ness isn't touched by them
instead
the tags tend to cluster tunes
recorded during the same era
with LP 'filler' more frequent than
hits
and often the dominant mood
can also be undercut
eg trip-hop is 'tag-similar'
to many other possible moods
