Pandora's box

Do you know about Pandora? Not the Greek antiheroine, mind you, but the website: a music site that allows you to enter the name of a band, or composer, or tune - Chopin, say, or Megadeth - and that then plays an infinite playlist of roughly comparable pieces of music. You're into Bebel Gilberto? Pandora will play her for you, along with some equally cool-cat pieces by Stan Getz and Nara Leao.

Here at halfstep, we've known about Pandora for the better part of a decade - since a hip art school student told us about it, in fact, as we fumbled through YouTube before a lecture in search of some vaguely atmospheric music. But it's really only in the last few months that we've begun to take our relationship with Pandora seriously. We've come to love, of late, the surprising associations that she draws (is Tom Petty really in the same genre as Bruce Springsteen? We like learning new tunes, and, to that end, we also like how Pandora always gives us the artist and title. She's no reticent d.j., that Pandora. And let's be honest: since L. linked a tablet up to our gourd speakers, ceding our musical curating to Pandora is as easy as pie. Plain and simple, we're hooked.

But I think that there's also a more basic reason that Pandora has made especial sense of late, and it's that our play rhythms often now approximate her apparent selection strategy. I don't mean that too ambitiously, for in fact the folks at Pandora are almost laughably specific in discussing their "Music Genome Project," the fruit of the work of a "team of musician-analysts"), where our approach to play with Cleo is, if anything, studiously anarchic. But I do think that there's often a loosely comparable associative logic in the order of activities that lead us from afternoon to evening in the pink house. Take today, for instance: on a snowy day, I picked Cleo up at 1, and we trundled home, stopping for a brownie and then imagining that we could take magically light footsteps that left no trace in the snow. When we arrived at home, it was time for a couple of Greek myths: not Pandora, today, but Apollo's conquest of Delphi and Orpheus' visit to the underworld. That gave way, in turn, to some wrestling of almost mythological proportions, as L. and Cleo tackled, grappled, and played. But the gods and the heroes, of course, are only part of the equation, and in the next hour we played with a doll house and Cleo then assumed the role of house mother, putting me to sleep and encouraging L. to do her home work. Finally, L. had the bright idea of playing charades, and we enacted zebras, snakes, and cows on the play room floor. And now they're making jambalaya, as I type away.

There's nothing consciously scientific about such a process of play, and indeed I suppose you could fairly doubt that there's really any process of pattern at all. But as we moved through a wide arc of imaginative activities that ranged from physical to recumbent and from active to passive, it did feel as though there was some semblance of an underlying thread. And yet, at the same time, we never knew what was coming next. Sometimes, it simply seems to happen, based on the whims and needs of three involved players.

After all, the monsters in Pandora's box were not unrelated. They may have been chaotic and diverse, but they belonged to a common species. As do our games, and the music that sometimes accompanies them.