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Researchers Create an Automatic Backup Band for Singers

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the william-hungs-of-the-world-unite dept.

Researchers at Microsoft Labs are hoping to allow untrained singers to have their own automatic backup band in the near future. A new piece of software, "MySong", promises to take a sung melody and using a probability computation algorithm, generate an appropriate chord accompaniment. There is also a video of the process on the Microsoft Labs website. "'The idea is to let a creative but musically untrained individual get a taste of song writing and music creation,' Morris told New Scientist. 'There was nothing out there that could take a sung vocal melody as an input and then generate appropriate chords to accompany it. [...] Since people rarely sing at precise frequencies, MySong compares a sung melody to the 12 standard musical notes. It then feeds an approximate sequence of notes to the system's chord probability computation algorithm. This algorithm has been trained, through analysis of 300 rock, pop, country and jazz songs, to recognize fragments of melody and chords that work well together, as well as chords that complement each another.'"

10 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. Hope they are not wasting much money on this. by suso · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is nothing new. The first piece of music hardware/software I saw that did this was called Vivace or something like that and it came out back in 1994. There are also other programs in the past and present that do this.

    1. Re:Hope they are not wasting much money on this. by PunkOfLinux · · Score: 1, Informative

      Because it's fucking impossible to find decent music around here, where we don't have any specialty music shops. All it is is pop shit. I'm sick of it.

      --
      Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
    2. Re:Hope they are not wasting much money on this. by King_TJ · · Score: 5, Informative

      The thing is, music has ALWAYS been based off mathematical formulas at its core. The "art" really lies in the musician picking and choosing options that work well together to create something pleasing to the ear. (Well, that plus the skill of being proficient in playing an instrument of choice, and/or talent in singing the vocals well.)

      I've played with software in the past that promised to build backing tracks "automatically". There's a pretty neat one called "The Jammer Pro", for example, or the more rudimentary "Band in a Box" software.

      The thing is, you still have to make musical decisions as to which portions of what they generate you'd like to keep, which you'd like to delete, and which give you some good ideas, but need "tweaking" to make the best use of them.

      The Jammer Pro, for example, would let you drag and drop in a "session rock guitarist" for example, and would write electric guitar solos to go along with the chord changes and tempo you specified as the "core" of your song. Some of these were really good! But you had to audition everything it made, and hit "redo" a lot to discard ones that weren't so good, before it came up with something that was a "keeper".

      I really don't envision a computer creating perfect "backing tracks" in real-time to any vocals sung into it. It's more like, it'll sometimes/often make "passable" ones, fun for karaoke or practicing -- but not worthy of recording.

    3. Re:Hope they are not wasting much money on this. by J.F.+Gallay · · Score: 5, Informative

      Vivace (now Smartmusic) uses preprogrammed MIDI files to accompany. It does not make it up. I teach harmony, and let me tell you that the vast majority of pop music out there is incredibly limited in its harmonic vocabulary. Out of all typical harmonic devices used to support a melody, your standard radio material probably uses about 5% of them. So, while this does seem to be a pretty simple and effective implementation of the same processes I teach to students, it is not that hard to do. As long as you set your sights on typical pop music, you can churn out the songs very quickly with sophomore-level training. As a professional musician myself, I for one welcome our new harmonic....oh, never mind.

    4. Re:Hope they are not wasting much money on this. by mpathetiq · · Score: 4, Informative

      I'm not sure if you realized it, but the machine you are using to post on Slashdot can also be used to research, discover AND purchase all kinds of music! It's amazing!

      --
      Post-rock/Ambient/Drone and other noise.
    5. Re:Hope they are not wasting much money on this. by DCstewieG · · Score: 2, Informative

      http://www.pandora.com/
      http://www.last.fm/

      Enjoy.

    6. Re:Hope they are not wasting much money on this. by ardle · · Score: 2, Informative

      I'm not exactly sure that there's any impediment to this being used for pop music. I agree - in fact, since pop music is formulaic, it's probably best suited for this ;-)
    7. Re:Hope they are not wasting much money on this. by joseamuniz · · Score: 2, Informative

      And since a human has to program the machine, the machine cannot be a better musician than the person or persons who programmed it.

      This must mean that the people who created cars must run pretty fast.

      Computers have a very fast raw processing power. The fact that someone comes up with an algorithm does not mean that he can run it in his head at the same speed as a computer would. For that reason, the computer might be able to do much more (in our timescale) than the human who created it. If you don't believe me, go to Matlab and ask it to graph some complicated function.

      I'm not denying that computer programmers cannot come close to replicating a human being's creative process at this point. However, I don't see a priori reason as to why this will always bee impossible, as you seem to suggest. I think creativity is just a set of processes that we don't understand... yet.

  2. Oblig. Grammar Correction by treeves · · Score: 2, Informative

    "Compliment each another"?
    chords and melodies cannot compliment one another, however, they can complement one another, like complementaty colors.
    and "each another" is just sloppy.
    I've got mod points, so I'm not worried too much about burning karma...thus the latent grammar Nazi comes out.

    --
    ...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
  3. And The Most Important Band Of The Last 20 Years by nick_davison · · Score: 3, Informative

    Most music journalists will flag Nirvana as being the most important band of the last 20 years.

    Watch the beginning/end of Dumb on MTV Unplugged. Kurt outright admits that they can't normally play Dumb and On A Plain back-to-back "because they're exactly the same song" but that TV editing will fix it.

    8 million people bought Nevermind (On A Plain)
    4 million people bought In Utero (Dumb)
    5 million people bought MTV Unplugged (both)

    Apparently a good song is still a good song, even if you record it as two separate ones.