July / august 2006:

In search of the Jewish musical genome
Pandora.com has found the music genome, but it couldn't find the Jewish tunes. What gives, and where's the Jewish musical DNA?

by Bradford R. Pilcher



The experiment was going to be simple enough. Take a bunch of Jewish music and dump it into Pandora, a music selection tool created by the Music Genome Project. Assuming you fed it a standard diet of Matisyahu and Shlomo Carlebach (for starters), it should spit out other Jewish music, perhaps even music I wasn’t previously aware of.

A little explanation is required. Pandora.com is a website wherein a user logs in and inputs a band or song title. Enter the Music Genome Project, a group of technologists and musicians who’ve spent the past half-decade analyzing thousands of songs for musical attributes. These “genes” represent how a song sounds, and include things like “electronica roots” and “a knack for catchy hooks” alongside “use of tonal harmonies.” Using a complex algorithm and a staff of musical analysts, Pandora creates a customized radio station based on your selected song or artist. Brilliant, right?

“It was supposed to be so easy.”

That’s not just a sentence. That’s the name of a song (by UK rap-maestro Mike Skinner, a.k.a. The Streets) that Pandora said I’d like after I asked for music similar to Hasidic reggae phenom Matisyahu. As it turns out, Pandora was absolutely right. I very much enjoyed Mr. Skinner’s musings on a day gone wrong. The problem was Skinner isn’t Jewish, and nothing in his raps had any Jewish subtext.

I asked for more Matisyahu-esque music, but what I wanted was more Jewish music, not more reggae or rap. Like an innocent puppy, the Pandora system just looked at me quizzically, its digital tail wagging in delight as it delivered a live track from Coldplay — I do not know why — and a veritable buffet of reggae tracks.

I tried Ofra Haza, an Israeli pop star of Yemenite origins, and I got “Rough Justice” by Bananarama and a British pop song from the 1980s with “basic rock song structures, a subtle use of vocal harmony, [and] extensive vamping.” If only I was in search of extensive vamping.

My problem was not so much with Pandora as it was with the definition of Jewish music. I was looking for Jewish lyrics, not a Jewish sound. As Pandora founder Tim Westergren pointed out when I asked him about this, “Our first objective is to recommend something that sounds like it belongs in the station, [and] the lyrics aren’t a sonically defining aspect of a piece of music. You can have a love song that’s punk rock or a country song.”

Jewish music, spanning multiple genres, fell into this crack in the system. And why wouldn’t it? When we talk about Jewish music these days, we’re talking about an awfully ill-defined genre. Take Miri Ben-Ari. Her music isn’t overtly Jewish. It’s essentially mainstream rap with an Israeli violinist in the background — which is apparently enough for inclusion in the cannon of Jewish hipsters. Perhaps we’d have an easier time navigating the ethnic trip-wires of the Beastie Boys, a group of Jewish white boys doing a style that traditionally belonged to the black community.

Is the violinist Alicia Jo Rabins’ solo instrumentals not Jewish music while her participation in JDub Records sextet Golem qualifies? The questions are endless. The answers remain elusive.

Pandora cannot reasonably be expected to solve this dillema, though odds are good that in the coming months it’s going to get much better at trying. The service requires human analysis, and they can only add about 12,000 new songs a month, what Westergren calls, “probably our single biggest limitation.” As they add more Jewish tracks to the database, they’ll naturally show up more often in the recommendations.

Pandora has already begun incorporating “social elements” into its algorithms, utilizing information like the preferences of other users who selected the same track as a way to give greater context to musical recommendations. Westergren also added, “We do analyze lyrics. We’re looking to allow people to specify that as something they’re looking for.”

Each of these improvements (along with a planned international expansion, which should tap into large swaths of Jewish music from foreign markets) will make Pandora better at targetting niche music and helping an already jaded journalist like myself discover things I hadn’t heard before.

But even in its current incarnation, the service has the power to surprise. After a few hours of listening, my ears perked up at a track from Lauryn Hill entitled, “To Zion.” The song opened the door to an entire afternoon spent with the R&B singer (originally of the Fugees) amidst myriad references to everything from the promised land to Manischewitz wine.

Such references grow not out of Hill’s Jewishness — she is not a member of the tribe — but out of her reggae influences, which are heavily colored by the Rastafarian religious movement. Nevertheless, Pandora had delivered. Now I just had to figure out if it was “Jewish” music or not.


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