Content area
Full Text
THE MAPPING OF THE HUMAN GENOME was supposed to take 15 years, but it was completed early in 2003 after 13 years of combined effort by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. The goal was to create a database that identified all of the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA and determine the sequences of chemical base pairs that comprise DNA-all three billion of them. The arrangement of the elements of the genomes accounts not only for the uniqueness but also for all the diversity in human life.
So what about music?
In the first week of the first month of the new century, a group of musicians and techies met "with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever." In the words of the founder of the Music Genome Project(TM), Tim Westergren, the reason for and the method of this analysis worked something like this:
"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...