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ED's picture

Pandora Explorin'

My bar graph illustrates total enjoyment of the songs Pandora chose next to the correspondance of the music's "actual" qualities as compared to the original qualities participants claimed to like. As the graph makes clear, enjoyment of the music is always higher than quality correspondance of the music. This relationship lets us draw several possible conclusions: 1. the five people participating in the survey aren't very aware of the qualities they "actually" like about music, 2. Pandora's choices did not (could not?) account for more qualitative, emotional or personal qualities that participants stated they liked, such as "thought-provoking lyrics", "witty lyrics," "brings back memories," "catchy hooks," and "soulful." The participants in the survey who stated more musically-savvy qualities like "varied rhythms," "piano-centric background," "nice harmonies" and "folk" (person 2, 4 and 5) were much more satisfied with the music choices and the qualities Pandora chose corresponded very closely to their own stated qualities. There is also an interesting connection, I think, between this relationship of how satisfied listeners were and how well the qualities matched, and how "negative" or "positive" participants' respective reactions were to the fact that Pandora might be able to make an algorithm for their music tastes. Again, those who were able to state the qualities they liked in more official and less personal terms felt much more positively (scoring 5 and 4) about this fact whereas the other, evidently less-satisfied group scored 2.5 and 3. Perhaps some people like to know what they like and have it be clear, while others prefer more mystery in their musical choices. The answers to the positive/negative question also could have been affected by the initial inability or refusal of some users (those who said 2.5 and 3) to use official music lingo that Pandora uses in their initial qualities/reasons for liking said artist.

Enjoyment of Music Next to Quality Correlation of Music; Person 1-5Enjoyment of Music Next to Quality Correlation of Music; Person 1-5

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