Last night, while playing a fantasy roleplay game, we listened to an appropriate selfmade radio channel at pandora. I just created a new channel with “Enya”, “Loreena McKennitt”, “Blackmore’s Night” and other artists we would probably have thrown into the CD player instead. We had to rate some songs over the night, but most the time the music was just what we wanted it to be. Surely with many artist we did not even know before. Cool!

Hearing two other channels with the very nice quick mix function along breakfast this morning, I thought about the technology behind it. What was not obvious to me, when using pandora, was that I describe what I want to hear. So it’s a form of declarative music playlist, analogous to fourth generation programming languages. In a simpler manner the “intelligent playlists” in iTunes are the same. As software developer, used to declarative languages like SQL, I use them most the time - but missing complexe conditions and ad-hoc querys.

Concerning pandora I miss one thing the most: I sometimes like to describe what I disliked within a specific song, because I don’t want pandora to guess. But that’s the offtrade, when handing over responsibility in those declarative ways.