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Researchers Create an Automatic Backup Band for Singers
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.'"
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.
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.