I’ve been a subscriber to Pandora for a couple of years now, and I really enjoy it. For those aren’t familiar with it, Pandora is a streaming music service that plays music based on seeds that you give it. The goal is to analyze the music you like, determine the characteristics that music has, and identify other music that matches the pattern and play it for you. I hasten to add, there’s no AI magic going on here; Pandora is based on something called the Music Genome Project, in which humans listen to songs and assess them relative to various qualities. For example, I asked Pandora why it was playing its current song. It answered:

We’re playing this track because it features electric rock instrumentation, ska influences, mild rhythmic syncopation, heavy use of vocal harmonies and many other similarities identified in the Music Genome Project.

And apparently I like all those things.

The interesting thing is that Pandora adjusts its notion of what you’ll like as it plays. You can give each song that appears a thumb’s up or a thumb’s down, and Pandora will use those assignments to better understand your preferences. And that’s a problem.

It’s a problem because Pandora can only assess the sound of a song, and not its sense. Once in a while a song will come along that I like the sound of, but dislike because of the lyrics—because the sense of the lyrics is egregiously immoral, or unpleasant, or simply repulsive. I can give it a thumb’s down, and Pandora will never play the song again, but I worry that Pandora will get the wrong idea. I’m objecting to the sense, and Pandora is going to assume that I’m objecting to the sound.

I don’t blame Pandora for this; it’s amazing that it does as good a job with the aesthetics as it does, and I expect that attempts to assess the sense in the same way would be unsatisfactory to everyone involved.

The reason I bring this up, though, is it seems to me that we listeners often judge music in the same way. We listen to the sound, and we ignore the sense. If it sounds good to us, we like it and we listen to it. What’s up with that? Where did the expectation that the sense doesn’t matter come from?

I’m no Tipper Gore; I’m not looking for parental advisory notifications or advocating a ban on music I personally find offensive. But why is it that we assume that popular music should be considered morally and philosophically neutral, when it manifestly is not?