Microsoft Songsmith Creates Music for Your Lyrics

Terry Olaes

Terry Olaes

I Used to be the [H] News Guy
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Nov 27, 2006
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I don’t know how many of you have had the dubious pleasure of hearing some of the classic tunes reinterpreted by Microsoft’s Songsmith but if you haven’t, you’re in for a treat. The NYTimes did a piece on the software so check it out if you’re a budding songwriter with no musician friends to accompany your lyrics. You may want to reconsider Songsmith’s suggested soundtrack after watching perennial favorite “Eye of the Tiger” though.

See article on the front page for the video. There are even more hideous examples of Songsmith's musical ministrations if you search YouTube. :eek:
 
Haha wow. A musician must be struggling pretty badly to resort to a computer program.
 
There's a ton more on Youtube. Most are pretty funny, some are absolutely cringing bad, some actually work if not for the total lack of progression. The best one of the bunch is probably Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin' On". Others included Creep, Roxanne, Wonderwall...
 
Blt44 said:
Haha wow. A musician must be struggling pretty badly to resort to a computer program.
Click to expand...

Like Garage Band and Protools? Both are tools you can use during the process. If anything, Songsmith can be used as a prearrangement tool to determine if the flow, structure works for you before moving on to writing the music around your melody. I've used much worse stuff in the past.
 
Fun software. Although I hardly would call anything that comes out of it as Art.
 
If you look at it from a programmer's point of perspective it looks like a pretty neat piece of software.

Sure it is in it's infancy and needs a lot of refinement, but most first versions of software are like that.

What would happen if they added different styles of music to choose from? What about picking specific instruments and key for the music to be in?

What about having it be able to change the key and timing that it was originally sung in? I mean, you can already do that with the aid of sound card utilities, re-mixing utilities, etc.

I think it is a good start and just needs some more work beforwe it can be an awesome program.

For me, it sounds like it makes everything into late 60's, early 70's drug inspired music.
 
as bad as current mainstream music is, the music industry may have already been using software to generate three minutes short piece of crap songs for years.
 
I must say, while these songs completely suck and are very funny to laugh at, this program did a pretty good job for a stupid software algorithm.

If this is what it can do now, maybe in five years, we'll be on to something.
 
Man the White Wedding one is all kinds of awesome.

And the Roxanne really highlights how much out of tune Sting is in that song.
 
Oh dear god the Van Halen song is Fucking Hillarious!! 40 seconds in I was falling out of my chair.. that was great..
 
Lol, I just listened to "Roxanne". At 0:09 when the music started I just burst out laughing. :p

Hey, this software is for the entertainment industry, right? Because this is a whole other kind of entertainment. :D
 
Every link in that NY Times article leads to pure enjoyment... WOW is this stuff bad!
 
BAHAHA! Roxanne, way to improve one of my favorite songs.
 
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