Remember the music you listened to in high school? I wish I didn’t. In a world where parents set your curfew and you’re conditioned to respond instantly to the bell signaling the end of your precious lunch period, listening to crappy music is OK. Be it rocking out to My Chemical Romance, rebelling with the bone-crushing Korn or tearing it up when “Yellow” by Coldplay is played on the radio for the fifth time in an hour, you could listen happily to your mass-produced music without hiding your head shamefully when a friend caught you in the act.

Now, however, you’re at Stanford, a school respected around the world as a place of culture and higher learning. Here, where students regularly refer to Nietzsche and Freud in everyday conversation, your complete collection of John Mayer is just not going to cut it. However, modern technology makes it easy to become familiar with music more worthy of your maturity level.

One of the most successful tools for do-it-yourself music discovery is an online radio service called Pandora (http://www.pandora.com), founded by Stanford’s very own Tim Westergren ‘88. When you first land on the site, a pretty, blue interface greets you warmly and invites you to enter the name of an artist or song that you particularly like. Pandora then directs you to their tuner, where a radio station based on the characteristics of the song or artist you just entered begins to play.

For example, if your favorite song is still “Yellow” by Coldplay, you can type that into the search box and instantly receive a stream of songs that are similar in style (which consists of “subtle use of harmony, major key tonality, acoustic rhythm guitars and many other traits”). With Pandora’s remarkable collection of music (over 500,000 tracks and growing), you’re practically guaranteed to hear something you’ve never heard before. Or if you don’t quite know where to start, you can try typing in a sub-genre like “Electronica,” which will load a pre-made station constructed by the resident expert at the Pandora office.

As you listen more to your station, you can gradually start fine-tuning it to play only songs you like. You can tell Pandora that you really like (or dislike) a song with a thumbs up or thumbs down button. To increase the variety of music on the station, you can “seed” the station with more songs or artists. Or you can create a whole new station (Pandora allows you to have up to 100 stations on your profile) with an entirely different feel. Go nuts; you’ve got 500,000 songs right at your fingertips.

The magic behind Pandora is a database of songs called the “Music Genome Project.” Before any given track is loaded into the collection, it has to be analyzed. What sets Pandora apart from other personal radio services like Yahoo’s Launchcast and Last.fm is that each song is analyzed by a real person. Pandora employs 40 or so local professional musicians with at least four years of background in music theory to listen to each song. The analyst determines where, on a scale of one to five, the song falls on over 400 musical “genes.”

These genes include enough theory to make the most stubborn of music geeks salivate. The vocal track alone can include genes such as register, amount of vibrato, use of gravel and even more subtle distinctions like breathiness and silkiness. All of these genes are stored in the Music Genome Project, where the track can be compared to other songs in the database. Pandora finds the most similar ones and sends them to your station.

Whether your entire iTunes collection fits on an iPod Shuffle with room to spare or you just want to discover different music you know you’ll like, check out Pandora. In no time, you’ll have graduated from a top-40 junkie to a knowledgeable music fanatic and be able to create your own collection.