As some of you may know, there’s a handful of us here at Pandora who have this one-of-a-kind job where we listen to individual songs and identify the musical elements present. We’re called, “Music Analysts,” though that makes us sound either like music industry speculators or white-coated lab techs monitoring oscilloscopes with medical-grade headphones.
We’re neither. We’re just a bunch of musicians (I’d say that makes us the coolest department in the company, but so many of the other people who work at Pandora are musicians too; our company jam sessions are ridiculous). That’s not to say we’re not a serious bunch. Music Analysts have to pass a listening test when applying, and we all go through a rigorous training before we’re set loose on the catalog. Each song we analyze is gone over with a fine-tooth comb, multiple times, and we’re responsible for knowing and choosing from among thousands of descriptors when tagging a song.
I was about to write, “some parts of a song are easy to describe and some are hard,” but then I couldn’t come up with an example of something that’s easy. Figuring out exactly how fast or how slow a track is, can be very easy, but you’d be surprised about how much debate it can sometimes spark (where the heck is the downbeat?!). Determining exactly what instruments are present is often a no-brainer, although… are those acoustic drums or programmed drums? A few of us on the team have been arguing about the distinctions between varieties of “twang” for over twenty years. Our Slack channels are filled with musicological minutiae that read like PhD thesis excerpts, but with emojis. And don’t even get me started about interpreting lyrics.
We thought, over the next few months, it might be fun to let you join in on some of the challenges that we on the Music Analysis team deal with hundreds of times a day. To kick things off and celebrate the season, we thought it would be fun to try to identify some Scary tracks.
To earn full-blown Scary, tracks need to consistently hit a certain threshold of eerie, creepy, disconcerting, terrifying or even horrifying.
Which of the following tracks would you give the Scary Mood tag to?
Skeletal Remains by Bohren and Der Club of Gore
Thriller by Michael Jackson
The Disintegration Loops by William Basinski
“The Munsters” Theme by Los Straitjackets
The Becoming by Nine Inch Nails
Main Theme (from A Nightmare on Elm Street) by Mark Ayres
Grim Grinning Ghosts (From “The Haunted Mansion”) by The Melomen, Bill Frees, Betty Taylor, Bill Lee, Thurl Ravenscroft
Witchy Woman by The Eagles
you should see me in a crown by Billie Eilish
Serial Killers by Gucci Mane
Comment with your Scary Mood tags below, and let us know your go-to scariest piece of music!