I have been a musician for most of my life. Through all my other employments has run the thread of a performing and recording artist, so I have a long-standing interest in most things musical.

We’ll save the stories of my wild and crazy past for another day. Today, I want to share a couple of interesting web sites with you that let you do all sorts of things barely imaginable only a few years ago.

I think it’s watching the relationships being drawn that is most appealing about Liveplasma.com. Type in the name of your favorite musical artist, movie, director or actor and Liveplasma starts drawing colored circles connected by lines representing the initial search criteria you input connected to groups, movies, etc. that the program thinks are similar to it. We’ll focus on the music search feature here, but the movie searches are no less fascinating.

This is like what Amazon does when you make a purchase (“If you like this book, here are some others you might enjoy.”) except it’s done graphically. It shows your primary choice, surrounded by other artists that the software has determined are similar. The width of the circle describes the popularity of your selection and how the color of your selection “bleeds” into the surrounding items indicates how it has influenced and been influenced by the connected artists. You can play with some of the display parameters, and free registration to the site lets you save your maps for playing with later. While it shows album covers with links to Amazon for purchase, I wish there was a way to hear some music – especially from the groups linked to my primary that I’m not familiar with.

Enter Pandora.com. This site lets you create the equivalent of your own personal radio station, based on initial music preferences that you input. Just type in the artist or song you’re looking for, and Pandora will pull up a possible match that you can accept or reject. If you like it, it will start to play something by the artist, or a song similar to the song you specified. It then rummages through its database to find more music based on its selection criteria. You can give feedback on whether you liked the song or not, and Pandora will mark it as a keeper or jettison it from that particular station’s songlist. If you want to add the selection to your CD or iPod collection, there are links to iTunes and Amazon on each album cover.

Pandora is the brainchild of Tim Westergren and his Music Genome Project. He and his musician and technogeek friends got together and started mapping out hundreds of musical attributes or genes (“vocal centric, “major key tonality”, etc.), in an attempt to create a comprehensive Music Genome. Pandora clumps groups and songs together based on what they actually sound like, not what market they’re targeting, how old they are or how they dress. Sounds like what I do when I make a mix tape.

You have to accept some realities/limitations with both these sites. First off, the selections are drawn from someone else’s preferences, based on criteria and software that you don’t know. The criteria, especially the music criteria, are heavily weighted towards contemporary music. Don’t hold out great expectations if searching for Toscanini. Liveplasma pulled the Madonna Tribute album in response to my query, and Pandora thought I might be looking for Truganini from Midnight Oil. Not really guys, but thanks for trying. Pandora offers the first ten hours free, and then asks for a subscription fee, which seems quite reasonable for the service offered. (Subscription fee is $36 per year, with no commercials!)

Of the two, Liveplasma is more visually engaging, but Pandora may be more satisfying in the longer term. Both sites can offer hours of amusement and entertainment, as well as the opportunity to discover music you might like but would never get exposed to otherwise.

That’s it for this week. Maybe you’ve run across some interesting web sites of your own you’d like to share. Drop me a line at mmtym@detroitbuzz.com, or post your site to our message board. All posts and comments are welcome.

Until next time, heed our Weekly Words of Wisdom:

"The 'silly' question is the first intimation of some totally new development.

- Alfred North Whitehead