Songsmith

[davidn]

The latest cluster of murmuring on the Internet over the last couple of days has been caused by Microsoft Songsmith, their latest attempt to become Apple by showing that they can do something fun and creative. Naturally this has been a disaster, largely because of the unintentional hilarity of the demonstration video that has found its way into the hands of Youtube, which has all the highbrow quality, acting and production values of a Sham-Wow infomercial. (Particularly note anything that Token Vaguely Foreign Man says in the middle.) And like everyone else, I was looking forward to going through it and then ripping it apart like Christmas wrapping paper... but after playing about with it a bit myself, I have to admit that technically, the concept is an interesting one.

On the surface, of course, the idea of Songsmith is patently hideous. As demonstrated in the video, its premise is that you can select a style and tempo, then it can digest your strained attempts at singing something and vomit out a sequence of chords that conform to the melody, relieving you of the inconvenient creative process in the middle. The disadvantage of this being that it's only a computer with a limited bank of musical patterns for each style, transforming everything you sing into it into Reggie Wilson Plays the Lift Music Classics. Artistically, it's nothing short of an insult to reduce musical qualities to instantly changeable slider bars (I'm not sure what the programmatic effect of each really is - "jazziness" might as well be labelled "percentage of wrong chords" from my experience), and this has everyone heated up about today's increasing gravitation towards instant solutions rather than spending the time to do anything remotely worthwhile.

But it was after singing something that I'm piecing together in Modplug (which I'm still using after nine years - let's face it, this isn't going to change that) into it that I began in a small way to appreciate what Songsmith was doing. I had tried this out to see if Songsmith's idea of the chords to use matched up at all to my own, to experiment with its effectiveness in choosing them. Honestly, any attempt at something so based on very human feeling through a computer is technically quite impressive - it apparently goes through note sequences from thousands of popular songs that they've looked at for the patterns - and though it had its odd choices here and there (which you could always blame on your voice - it's difficult to tell) it got things surprisingly right about half the time. In particular I was very surprised to find, after correcting some of the more extravagant choices, that one of its suggestions for me (the as-yet-unexplored potential of D minor) actually sounded better than what I had originally. Once I had tried translating it back into the Modplug version I decided that it was good enough to keep.

This isn't going to be the death of creativity as it seems to be promoting itself - it's never going to be able to produce anything that isn't instantly recognizable as a template set to different chords. But as something to play about with, to experiment, its immediacy is quite welcome in that you can change its ideas around yourself to see what fits best - equivalent to stabbing at a Yamaha keyboard on one-finger chord mode, which is appropriate given that that's what it's going to make every song sound like anyway.

As far as spectacular achievements go, though, it is certainly going to get one, in that it's about to make Myspace even more abhorrent.

Comments

[diarytypething.livejournal.com]

It sounds like they've just rendered a big chunk of the Standard Grade Music syllabus obsolete. It took a couple of weeks for our class to all get the hang of working out which one-finger chord to use with certain sequences of notes. There is a bit of science to how you choose the chords, but there are also more complicated things to do with chord progressions and where you put different sequences of the buggers in a piece of music to convey certain things, so they've probably just fed this information into the computer and hoped for the best. Which is why it sounds like the result is roughly equivalent to button bashing from a 14-year-old who sings off-key and can play the recorder a bit.

[davidn]

People are usually surprised when I say that I don't know a whole lot about music theory - I did get up to Grade 5, but I never learned much in the way of chord names, intervals or the science of how and where to change them. It's more about feeling, intuition and experimentation - things that computers are still very bad at for the most part.

[dr-dos.livejournal.com]

It's like it generates Canyon.mid alternatives.

[kjorteo]

But can it handle strikerkingcheetah?

[davidn]

Looking at it optimistically, it can't make him any worse. Seeing as literally all the songs from it come out sounding like the lift music in the video, regardless of the style chosen, it might even make his performances a bit more cheerful.

[starfishchris.livejournal.com]

Microsoft made a music generator some time ago, but it was MIDI-only - so you can't say they don't have experience in this area. Algorithmic music has been worked at for quite a while, too.

In particular I was very surprised to find, after correcting some of the more extravagant choices, that one of its suggestions for me (the as-yet-unexplored potential of D minor) actually sounded better than what I had originally.

Not a case of monkeys on typewriters producing Shakespeare? Not that it's an entirely bad thing if you know a little about what sounds acceptable, because it'll throw out some good suggestions some of the time that you wouldn't have thought of previously. However the usefulness of that is sure to fade after a while.


FWIW, if you ask any competent musician, "jazziness" almost certainly means "number of wrong chords". They will also be quick to point out that if you're going to use terms like that, let alone treat it as something quantifiable, you probably deserve what you get. :D

[davidn]

It does seem to be reasonably competent at... simpler patterns - I'm fairly sure if I hummed Canon in D at it it would get it right. It certainly helps to know what you're after in general, in which case you wouldn't ever dream of using this experimental toy for its promoted purpose of producing musical Kryptonite.

(I also posted this journal on FA and BenH/Nitro has now got hold of it, so perhaps I've unwittingly unleashed more chaos on the world than I ever thought.)

[kjorteo]

The availability of a simple cheater's tool for any talentless hack to pretend they're an artist can't have that detrimental an effect on the medium as a whole. I mean, how many visual abominations do you see on certain art sites now that Poser has become popular?

...Oh, dear. We're doomed.

[starfishchris.livejournal.com]

It can be produced for good after all... (http://i.gizmodo.com/5143572/microsoft-songsmith-cheerily-documents-the-collapse-of-the-world-economy)