In response to my recent post about identifying songs that create a Scary Mood, someone asked me what the hardest or most time-consuming songs for us Music Analysts to deal with are. It’s a great question, or more precisely, two great questions, because time-consuming and hard aren’t necessarily the same things.     The assumption (even by me) would be that the more complex a track is, the harder it will be to analyze. Not quite true. At a certain point, complexity becomes simple to identify and capture. If a song has 15 different sections, we have straight-forward ways of indicating that the form is complex and that the structure plays a significant role in the identity of the song. It’s easy to hear when a track has extreme metric variations and odd time signatures, or hyper complex chord progressions, though it might take a while to describe it accurately. If a song has extensive instrumentation, like this Caetano Veloso gem, it can be fatiguing to identify them all and say what each one is doing, but we know what instruments sound like. That’s our thing.       It is, however, time-consuming. It can sometimes feel like you’re a paleontologist excavating hundreds of tiny bones of a skeleton with a set of tweezers. Slow, methodical labor, but not heavy mental lifting. A 26-minute prog rock epic takes FOREVER, but it’s not necessarily hard, and I can guarantee that it’s a labor of love for someone on our team. What makes something hard to analyze is ambiguity and the defying of expectations. Ambiguity can come in many forms. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if a piece of music is in a major or minor key, like this intentionally ambiguous piano piece by Bruce Wolosoff. Or perhaps the lyrics are so open to interpretation that you have no idea how to begin describing them. Beck’s early work was infamous for this. And sometimes, ambiguity occurs when the music is simultaneously more than one thing, like how this Anthony Braxton composition flickers between being an homage to John Philip Sousa and an experimental big  band extravaganza.      It can also be a real challenge when an artist known for a particular type of music, releases something completely different from anything they’ve done before. Especially when it can’t be easily categorized, like Andre 3000’s foray into… what exactly? There are some tracks that cross so many creative boundaries that they require specialists from multiple different genres to weigh in, like this avant jazz world fusion track that incorporates traditional Korean influence and instrumentation.      Then there are some tracks that confound on multiple levels, eluding existing definitions, like this genre-morphing abstract emo mind-bender by Lecx Stacy where it’s hard to tell if the sounds are real instruments or synthesized and half of the lyrics are inscrutable. While these kinds of tracks might push our analytical ears to the limits, they’re also likely to be the ones we add to our collections and revisit on our own time. ... View more

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! ... View more