IAR Strategies - The Song Decoders

Invention

What is invention?
- The author, Rob Walker, had to look up the history of Pandora before creating this text
- Walker used Twitter to issue a call to Pandora users who feel that it had an impact on their listening tastes
- Walker sat in a meeting of several Pandora's song deconstructors talking about Indian music
- Walker used Pandora himself by typing in the name of a specific artist or song on the website

What is being invented?
- Walker is unveiling the behind the scenes action of the methods of Pandora
- He explains "The Music Genome Project" of Pandora which involves algorithms and "genes" of songs that a computer can analyze to see what other songs you would like depending on one you picked

Arrangement

What is arrangement?
- Walker is putting individual tastes in music in relation to how Pandora arranges music
- How Pandora arranges and analyzes music is free of cultural influence and very technical
- Individual tastes in music depend on culture and peers and common sense

What is being arranged?
- Walker uses evidence and quotes from Pandora users who are both unimpressed and impressed by Pandora's method of analyzing music
- Walker breaks down how Pandora decodes songs and groups them in relation to how others may group their music tastes

Revision

What is revision?
- Walker states that Pandora can guide listeners to what music they like using their algorithm
- He says that lately, social systems of music-liking are popular and Pandora is one of them

What is being revised?
- Walker provides a lot of support including quotes from Pandora users and C.E.O.'s of other companies similar to Pandora
- He gets direct methods of how Pandora analyzes music including melody, harmony, rhythm, lyrics, etc.

Reflection Memo

     When trying to think of a topic for paper #1, I decided to choose a literacy that I did the most often. Looking back at the literacy logs that we filled out, I noticed that the literacy that I did the most each day was texting. Once figuring that out, it was easy to think of many issues that related to texting. Some issues that I brainstormed included texting in class, texting while driving, texting at the table, and cyber bullying. Out of these ideas, I had to pick one that was relevant to me in the sense that it applied to some event that occurred in my life. Looking at what I came up with, my story of my friend texting and driving jumped in my mind which was perfect because it was one of the more major issues out of everything on my list.

     As I started to write my rough draft, I planned to start off with my narrative. As I was explaining it, there were many parts in the story where I wanted to stop and explain how this was an issue. That is when I decided to split up my story and connect it to the issue separately.

     When revising the rough draft, I made sure that my story and how that story connects to the issue was clearly differentiated. My main concern was that readers would confuse the two which would ruin the flow of the whole paper.

     I think that a strength of paper #1 was the format as it was unconventional and engaging. A weakness was finding a good balance between the lengths of the story and the issue. I learned that it is wise to write the rough draft little by little everyday so you won't be overwhelmed last minute. I want paper #2 to be more planned out as a lot more research has to go into this paper compared to the first.