Microsoft Songsmith: A New Internet Phenomenon

I came across Microsoft's Songsmith a few weeks back. In a nutshell, its a program that provides automatic musical accompaniment to the user singing a vocal melody into their computers microphone. Not a totally new idea, midi based song generators have been around for years, but the ability to sing into a shitty mic and provide something out the other end is kinda new I guess. Anyway, it seems to have inspired a load of people to create "Songsmith" versions of pop songs and put them up on youtube. They vary in quality and the "karaoke" versions are best avoided, but those that used the original vocal tracks do sometimes come up with "interesting" results. That's Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" vocal ran through Songsmith in the above video.



I choose Queen's "We Will Rock You" as another example. There's something sweet about it (and the accidental Microsoft "ding-dong" is cute). The pauses in the song sound great! And before you scoff at it completely, musically it's not totally off the wall. We Will Rock You is from Queen's 1977 album News Of The World. Included on that album is a John Deacon penned track "Who Needs You". There's a not too different Latin flavour to that track as well.

Oh one last thing, Tim Exile's take on Obama and Songsmiths take on Obama.

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