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It's fairly easy to make automated music that "doesn't sound bad" by choosing a set of chords and a set of notes, then choosing at random. As long as your chords roughly match your melody, and it ends on a tonic it'll sound alright

Band-in-a-Box does a fairly good job of generating nice sounding music, and a great job of arraigning it too.

Although you can input your own melodies and/or chords, it also can generate melodies and chords from whole cloth.

http://www.pgmusic.com/bbwin.d...
(Try "Exploring Band-in-a-Box 2013")

Songsmith is just a cheap ($30) little program obviously aimed at the casual or party game market to allow people to experience what it is like to be a singer with a backing group. It is not intended for serious use or to replace real musicians. If that had been the intention then they would have priced it much higher to compete with Band-in-a-box.

Similarly, this cartoon drawing system is not part of some plot to put real artists out of work. It is designed to incorporate stylised caricatures within games or for generating avatars.

If you'd bothered to do just a little checking before posting, you'd know that PGMusic is one Microsoft's partners in the Songsmith project who are already selling add-on style packs for it:

http://www.pgmusic.com/songsmith.htm

So Microsoft Research reinvents Band-in-a-Box which has been around for years and already lets you feed it an MP3 and it'll tell you the chord changes. Then you can use that to have Band-in-a-Box generate a song in any style you choose. Nothing new here. Move along.

So Microsoft Research reinvents Band-in-a-Box which has been around for years and already lets you feed it an MP3 and it'll tell you the chord changes. Then you can use that to have Band-in-a-Box generate a song in any style you choose. Nothing new here. Move along.

For an alternative, you may like to check out Band-in-a-box

Lifted from the site: "Band-in-a-Box automatically generates a complete professional quality arrangement of piano, bass, drums, guitar and strings in a wide variety of popular styles. (Jazz, Pop, Country, Classical and more.)"

OK this may sound like a shameless plug, but at least it's on-topic.

I've used Band-in-a-box as a modern alternative to the rhythm-box found in most modern midi keyboards and electronic organs (music-minus-one). At least you don't get all weary and bored after listening to it for more than 64 measures...

I for one think that most aleatoric and algorithmic music generators sound soul-less and dull after some time listening to them and are of little use except for some kinds of 'ambient' music.
At least the guy who did Band-in-a-box seems to have a decent idea of musical structure, chord progressions, feel etc.

I recall seeing a Cope video where "The Beatles" was an option in EMI... He's never posted any EMI works by a pop group that I know of. I suspect that the "sound" of a particular group depends more on the vocal quality of the lead singer than anything else.

I should explain EMI is a "recomposer" - you feed it source material that it analyzes (harmonic function, melodic line, etc.) and then stores into a database.

One thing the pattern matcher looks for are motifs and cliches that a composer tends to employ across works. These are the musical chunks that help us recognize works as belonging to one particular composer or another.

Interestingly, Cope discovered that most of these "fingerprints" occured in the cadences (at the finish of the musical phrase) instead of as favorite melodic patterns or harmonies (although these certainly exist, and EMI uses them as well).

EMI composes a "new" work by creating "generic" music (often based on the pattern of a composer's work) and overlays it with functional bits from its database. The result is an often convincing (if bland) work in the style of a composer.

Unfortunately, in order to make music recombine well, some simplification of the input work is done. Cope acknowledge that how well this "simplification" is done - as well as how well chosen the works are for commonality - heavily influences the end result.

Still, I think it's interesting work. The music that it (re)composes is certainly better job at creating passable music in a particular composer's style than any other program I've looked at - including Band in a Box.

With a piece of pitch correcting software or hardware, like widely used Auto-Tune, a singer do not even need to have good ears, as all his false tones will be corrected. And software like Band in a box will make all arrangement for ya, just tell it what style you want. Songs can be made like sandwiches at McDonalds, and many are actually done this way. It has nothing to do with music, it's only about business. While people eat this sounding food, it will be so.

band in a box uses markov chains to compose music for you.