MTV Music Generator Helped Create Chart Music

sharph writes "A band called Boomkat, made up of Kellin Manning and his sister Taryn, use the Playstation game MTV Music Generator to sketch out songs before re-recording them. Here's a NY Times article about it (Yeah, free reg. required.) Their first single, "The Wreckoning", got to No. 24 on the US pop charts. Interesting read."

Comments

Console controller as instrument

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This brings up an interesting point. One of the main struggles in learning a musical instrument is essentially learning the interface- being able to get to the point where you don't have to look at where your fingers are to get the notes you want. A few hours with any good button-masher on a console will get you to this point with the controller, and after playing through several games, this becomes second nature. The PS Controller has 16 game play buttons (I'm counting 8 for the direction pad) and consider how often many of you have been hunched over the booklet "reading" the notation for a fighting game and punching the buttons for a certain move without looking. This is certainly analogous to reading music. It would seem natural to pop a music-generating program in and be able to hit the ground running once the "moves" are figured out.