By Michelle Goldberg

THERE'S ALMOST SOMETHING comforting about the inaccuracy of Sonicnet's make-your-own radio stations. The free service, available at radio.sonicnet.com, creates a customized audio stream based on your rating of genres and individual artists. You can specify, for example, that you want to hear lots of East Coast rap, no West Coast rap, and just a bit of soul, and that you prefer Lil' Kim to Foxy Brown. It should in theory be more enjoyable than regular radio. Yet my station, a combination of alternative '80s music, indie rock, and ambient, plays songs I hate, including tracks by Jesus Jones and the Cranberries. Sure, I can remove those artists from the playlist and work to make my station cater to my tastes much more precisely, but I'm a bit relieved that my predilections can't be easily reduced to an algorithm.

At least not on Sonicnet. Elsewhere in cyberspace, though, a variety of streaming audio sites and new music browsers are promising a musical experience that's personalized to an unprecedented degree. Redwood City's MongoMusic.com (recently bought by Microsoft) creates "stations" by extrapolating from information you give it about your favorite songs and albums or by specifying the style, weight, and tempo of the music you want to hear. At the San Francisco-based MoodLogic.com you can input the genre, mood, tempo, beat, decade, style of lead vocal, instruments, and "popularity" of the songs you want streamed to you. Seattle's Cantametrix has created technology that trains a computer to "listen" to music in the same way that a human does and then classify it by analyzing its melody, tempo, harmony, and timbre, thus letting users search by, say, "happiness."

All of this begs the question of whether taste can indeed be reduced to a mathematical formula – and whether music has an essence that transcends its constituent parts. The romantic notion of music as an ineffable outpouring of an artist's soul seems downright irrelevant when listeners can request a song that's light, sentimental but not brooding, with a jaunty beat, smooth female vocals, and piano. In the environment engendered by these search tools, music is less about an artist's self-expression than a customer's desire for self-reflection.

In a debate on Slashdot, one writer evinced horror at the idea of classifying music in such concrete terms: "Surely you can't define something as intensely personal as music through something as crude and impersonal as a mathematical algorithm? I'm all for the advancement of science, but I can't see that [they'll] ever be able to write an algorithm that [can] capture the 'essence' of a good piece of music." Other contributors quickly attacked him as deluded and sentimental, and in certain ways the technology backs their view. When asked whether music has a spirit beyond its quantifiable parts, Max Wells, cofounder and chief technical officer of Cantametrix, replied, "I suspect that as with most debates of this type, it's a kind of religious question." He's right, and as with most religious questions, the more technology progresses, the more brutally our sacred illusions are bulldozed.

Perhaps the first one to go will be our idea of what music is for. Like art in general, serious music, whether pop, classical, or avant-garde, has often fancied itself above prosaic concerns about "usefulness." Part of the reason Muzak seems sinister is that, aside from being grotesquely insipid, it's a tool, not an art. Rather than self-expression, it's raison d'être is mind control.

As Joseph Lanza wrote in his book Elevator Music, Muzak's early goal was to "supply its clients with a program of tunes segmented by mood as a tonic for the times of day when the human spirit sags." In the 1930s psychologists started studying background music's effect on employee morale and performance, and the results spurred Muzak's growth. Factories can determine a particular sound's effects on productivity; stores know precisely how the canned music they play affects spending patterns. Lanza writes that Muzak president Waddil Catchings "came up with the idea of assigning each song in the Muzak library a stimulus code that could be stored and transmitted according to rhythm, tempo, instrumentation and ensemble size." Sound familiar? These kinds of classifications help the company deploy music with the utmost specificity, whether it's spare, bouncy jazz used to pep up workers in the morning or billowy strings used to soothe shoppers in the afternoon.

Tools like MoodLogic and Cantametrix turn the whole world of music into a kind of Muzak. You could think of Cantametrix as "an explicit acknowledgment" of music's utilitarian value, Wells says. "The idea of using music in this functional way is not something we've invented. We're just bringing that kind of functionality to the masses." Wells argues that people have always understood music this way. "Most people don't listen to the poetry of the music," he says. "I'm not saying anything that any record executive doesn't already know. Our research has shown a number of things, and one is that people want to be able to classify and find music by mood. People use music to enhance and to change their mood."

And of course this is true. As I write this, it's bleak and rainy outside, putting me in the mood for languorous, lugubrious songs. I open Radio Mongo at MongoMusic and request ultraslow, medium-heavy indie rock songs, and the moody Tortoise track that opens my set perfectly suits my melancholy. More dolorous tracks follow. Later, wanting to cheer up a bit, I make the weight one point lighter and the tempo one point faster. A delicious track by the gritty-girlie pop-punk band Clare Quilty comes on, followed by a twisted lo-fi song from Wandering Lucy. I change the station to mellow but heavy electronica and get a thick, sultry, rough track from a group called Baby Fox. None of it blows me away, but it all suits me fine.

The creators of mood-based browsers say that they'll expand people's musical horizons, and indeed I've never heard about half of the songs MongoMusic plays me. Bob Gjerdingen, associate professor of music at Northwestern and MoodLogic's "Vice President of Music Taxonomy," gives the example of a 50-year-old soybean farmer who loves Merle Haggard. "Through MoodLogic, he may discover Lefty Frizzell. A country music junky knows that Merle Haggard came later and was influenced by Lefty Frizzell, but for that guy Lefty Frizzell is a really good result. That's a real service to the person. He found something that is right up his alley that he never knew about before." MoodLogic, Gjerdingen says, helps people who don't know esoteric genre terms wade through the massive amounts of music available online to find sounds they connect with.

At the same time, though, those perfectly tailored searches and stations may also ensure that listeners never hear anything outside their ken. After all, you'll program your station to play music you're familiar with, meaning there might be even less of an audience for innovation than ever. It's a pitfall Gjerdingen recognizes. "If we have personalized radio, where do we get our tastes from?" he asks. "If everyone is listening to their own worlds, how does any new music enter the system?"

And if we all live in our own aural universes, how does community develop? After all, a musical subculture is based on people who have similar, not identical, tastes. But given the oceans of music out there, all of it equally accessible because of the Internet, my station set to play slow, medium-light indie rock might not include any of the songs on a friend's medium-tempo, slightly heavy alternative channel. After 15 minutes of playing around on MongoMusic, I've created a station that surprises and delights me with the songs it plays. The Magnetic Fields is on heavy rotation, while Alex Chilton and Sarah Dougher both come on within a half hour. Once in a while a band I've never heard before will appear, but the joy of discovery is muted by the fact that I'm the only one hearing it. When I was a teenager, college radio stations were the soundtrack to group adventures; this station accompanies me alone. The music may be speaking right to me, but it's alienating being a niche market of one.

All of this aside, though, the single most disturbing issue raised by these new technologies is the possibility that the instant focus-group research they generate could be used against musicians. The Internet may well undermine major labels, but nothing about the history of the Web so far suggests that it inevitably frees creators from some kind of corporate control. Currently, music execs have a vague idea of what the public wants, but technology like MoodLogic can give them a far more exact picture. Through their site Jaboom.com, the company offers users Amazon.com gift certificates in exchange for rating music. Its press kit promises, "We can tell you almost anything you want to know about how the listening public perceives half a million different popular songs, in terms of 120 distinct attributes." Corporations may be able to learn with scientific precision what percentage of people dislike music with theremins, or how many prefer high-pitched women singers to deep, soulful ones. Look at what's happened with Internet publishing: online magazine staffs now know how many people read each story, and at sites like Salon that information has been used as the basis for jettisoning less-popular departments. In music such data could lead to whole new market pressures.

Back at Radio Sonicnet, I try to retool my station. I instruct it to play Yo La Tengo and Ladybug Transistor "a lot" and to remove Deep Forest, Atari Teenage Riot, and Devo. When I launch it again, the window that indicates who's playing isn't working, but the song coming out is some annoying country-inflected duet with a hideous electric guitar solo. When that's followed by an annoyingly generic boy-rawk track, I close the window and go to the Morning Becomes Eclectic archives at KCRW.com. Santa Monica College's Morning Becomes Eclectic is one of the best radio shows on the planet, a program that will include Johnny Cash, David Holmes, and P.J. Harvey on the same broadcast. A recent show features a group called Mirah, who released an album this summer on K Records. I've never heard of them, but I listen and am enchanted. It's crystalline sweet-sour pop somewhere between riot grrrl and the Sundays, and I immediately order it online. So far, technology made to find music just for me can't compete with a stranger choosing songs in a city hundreds of miles away.

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