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Pandora (which is also the name of the company) grew out of the Music Genome Project, which company founder Tim Westergren began six years ago.

He became fascinated with the way directors described the music they were looking for, which led to his wondering what made people enjoy certain types of music. He asked himself, "If people haven't found any music that they love since college, and artists are struggling to find an audience, is there a role for technology to help bridge the gap?"

Westergren started the Genome Project from the idea of creating a platform for connecting people with music that they'll love based on music they already enjoy. The project uses experts called "music analysts" to deconstruct music into its fundamental parts and capture the results into a database. Pandora has 40 professional musicians who come to the office every day and listen to one song at a time, analyzing each in anywhere from 200 to 400 dimensions. (The dimensions are somewhat different for each genre of music.)

Anthony Storr, in his excellent book Music and the Mind, stresses that in all societies, a primary function of music is collective and communal, to bring and bind people together

People with Tourette's syndrome—including many I know who are professional musicians—may become composed, tic-free, when they listen to or perform music; but they may also be driven by certain kinds of music into an uncontrollable ticcing that is entrained with the beat

There is a wide range of sensitivity to the emotional power of music, ranging from virtual indifference at one extreme (Freud was said to be indifferent to music, and never wrote about it), to a sensitivity that can barely be controlled. Individuals with Williams syndrome, for example, though they have severe visual and cognitive defects, are often musically gifted, and usually extravagantly sensitive to the emotional impact of music. I have seen few sights more extraordinary than a group of 40 young people with Williams syndrome breaking into uncontrollable weeping at tender or sad music, or uncontrollably excited if the music is animated.

Pandora has no concept of genre, user connections or ratings. It doesn't care what other people who like Gomez also like. When you create a radio station on Pandora, it uses a pretty radical approach to delivering your personalized selections: Having analyzed the musical structures present in the songs you like, it plays other songs that possess similar musical traits

Pandora relies on a Music Genome that consists of 400 musical attributes covering the qualities of melody, harmony, rhythm, form, composition and lyrics. It's a project that began in January 2000 and took 30 experts in music theory five years to complete. The Genome is based on an intricate analysis by actual humans (about 20 to 30 minutes per four-minute song) of the music of 10,000 artists from the past 100 years. The analysis of new music continues every day since Pandora's online launch in August 2005. As of May 2006, the Genome's music library contains 400,000 analyzed songs from 20,000 contemporary artists. You won't find Latin or classical yet: Pandora is in the process of developing a specialized Latin music Genome and is still deep in thought about how to approach the world of classical composition.

our brains actually respond differently to happy and sad music

hat after hearing a short piece of music, participants were more likely to interpret a neutral expression as happy or sad, to match the tone of the music they heard.

moderate noise levels increase processing difficulty which promotes abstract processing, leading to higher creativity

The results: The patients who listened to music had less anxiety and lower cortisol than people who took drugs. Levitin cautioned that this is only one study, and more research needs to be done to confirm the results, but it points toward a powerful medicinal use for music.

Among participants, the researchers found synchronization in several key brain areas, and similar brain activity patterns in different people who listen to the same music. This suggests that the participants not only perceive the music the same way, but, despite whatever personal differences they brought to the table, there's a level on which they share a common experience.

"It’s true that the algorithms mathematically match songs, but the math, all it’s doing is translating what a human being is actually measuring," says Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora in 2000 and now serves as its Chief Strategy Officer. “You need a human ear to discern.”

Pandora’s secret sauce is people. Music lovers.

"That is the magic bullet for us," Westergren says of the company’s human element. "I can’t overstate it. It’s been the most important part of Pandora. It defines us in so many ways."

Children who received at least three years (M = 4.6 years) of instrumental music training outperformed their control counterparts on two outcomes closely related to music (auditory discrimination abilities and fine motor skills) and on two outcomes distantly related to music (vocabulary and nonverbal reasoning skills). Duration of training also predicted these outcomes. Contrary to previous research, instrumental music training was not associated with heightened spatial skills, phonemic awareness, or mathematical abilities

Participants generally had the highest scores under the classical music condition and the lowest scores under the silence condition. In addition, most participants rated their arousal as highest after listening to classical music.

Pandora’s 48 million users tune in an average 11.6 hours a month. That could increase as Pandora strikes deals with the makers of cars, televisions and stereos

At the end of 2009, Pandora reported its first profitable quarter and $50 million in annual revenue — mostly from ads and the rest from subscriptions and payments from iTunes and Amazon.com when people buy music.

Its library now has 700,000 songs, each categorized by an employee based on 400 musical attributes, like whether the voice is breathy, like Charlotte Gainsbourg, or gravelly like Tom Waits.

Pandora continues to grow with 250 million registered users

There are one billion FM radios in the US and 160 million smartphones and 160 million PCs, so it’s still a subset of the FM marketplace.

Pittman doesn’t believe streaming hours will overtake traditional radio in his lifetime.

Both have established impressive track records leading Pandora’s strong team of technologists.

“I’m excited to promote two top technology leaders to these important positions.

Mr. Conrad has led Pandora’s engineering and product organization from the product’s inception and has guided the team as they delivered increasingly sophisticated playlist techniques, mobile, consumer electronics and in-car listening technology, as well as sophisticated advertising solutions

Pythagoras of Samos (/pɪˈθæɡərəs/; Ancient Greek: Πυθαγόρας ὁ Σάμιος Pythagóras ho Sámios “Pythagoras the Samian”, or simply Πυθαγόρας; Πυθαγόρης in Ionian Greek; c. 570 BC – c. 495 BC)[1][2] was an Ionian Greek philosopher, mathematician, and founder of the religious movement called Pythagoreanism.

Since the fourth century AD, Pythagoras has commonly been given credit for discovering the Pythagorean theorem, a theorem in geometry that states that in a right-angled triangle the area of the square on the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares of the other two sides—that is,

While the theorem that now bears his name was known and previously utilized by the Babylonians and Indians, he, or his students, are often said to have constructed the first proof. It must, however, be stressed that the way in which the Babylonians handled Pythagorean numbers implies that they knew that the principle was generally applicable, and knew some kind of proof, which has not yet been found in the (still largely unpublished) cuneiform sources.[47]

In March, Pandora hired local sales staff in St. Louis as part of its strategy to court local advertisers, and it’s had success out of the gate landing customers. Don Brown Chevrolet, Barnes-Jewish Hospital, St. Louis University and Panera Bread Co. are just a few of the advertisers that have booked ads on Pandora so far this year.

It’s spent the past two years expanding its sales staff nationwide.

Its regional sales staff of 60 employees nationwide is growing, and Pandora plans on ultimately having an office in each of the top 50 radio markets.