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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.'"
Fuck this. This is just going to make pop music even MORE dreadful to those of us who actually appreciate the artistic quality of music. Oh, look, some blond whore can screech into the mic and it'll make the whole damn song for her! Yay! Yes, let's take one of the most important part of music creation and base IT off of a formula now, too.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Now they just need to have artificial voices sing music, and random word generators to make lyrics, and the music companies can stop paying those pesky artists!
Uh, so don't listen to it... I don't understand why people like you get so angry over pop music, welcome to the free world where you can listen to whatever music you like, and hopefully let others do the same.
...even if you can get it to create long, coherent chord progressions, it still will have to stick to chords that match whatever was sung. Even if the system knows how to do jazzy chord changes and secondary function chords and such, an amateur singer won't sing a melody that will flow well with that.
The melody and the chord structure fit together very intimately. If someone doesn't "hear" the chords they want in their head, they probably won't sing a melody that will need an interesting chord progression behind it to make it work.
And of course, for any given melody, there are multiple possible progressions (do you want a IV or a I chord here? Or maybe a V7/V?). The singer will need to have the musical sense to choose which one they want.
All music is fomulaic. How do you think Beethoven was able to compose music even after he went deaf? Bach's music has been used as an example of how the mathmatics of music is similar to Godel's theory. Ever seen two musicians "jam" together? Ever wonder how they can sound so great even though it's the first time they've ever played together? It's becuase it's formulaic, once you know the formula for jazz you can play with any jazz musician (assuming you can play an instrument). Get off your ignorant high horse. Our ears are trained to favor harmonious sounds and reject dischord. There are alot of very talented "pop" artists. The only reason they are considered "pop" artists is becuase their music became popular! That means alot of people like it, it doesn't mean it's crappy music.
Exactly. People seem to have missed the point that this is an interesting innovation in expert systems, not a request to hold forth on how whatever dreary, droning indie crap they listen to makes them superior to everyone around them.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Creating complex music (not 1-4-5 stuff) is actually rather hard. Deceptively so, in fact, because it doesn't always sound hard until you actually try to write it and you realize that nothing sounds the way you thought it would.
As a musician, I actually think it's kind of neat. I could actually have some fun with something like this.
Machines cannot replace musicians. Music is emotional. It is improv. It is creative. Machines do as they are told, and even if they have some complex AI going on, they can still only function according to the parameters they are given. And since a human has to program the machine, the machine cannot be a better musician than the person or persons who programmed it. There is a difference between playing chords to a song and making it your own. Think of all the jazz standards, for example. How many different versions are there of, for example, Misty? Countless. Or how many songs use Gershiwn's "Rhythm" changes? Check this out: http://songtrellis.com/changesPage. Lots of chord changes there. But each version of each song is unique. Music is art. It's not about who is technically "better" or who plays the changes perfectly; oftentimes it the deviations from perfection that can make a song so compelling. Until someone makes a machine with the ability to improvise in response to the lead singer or soloist, convey emotion, *enjoy* music, and discover new things through taking risks and making mistakes, musicians won't become obsolete whatever that means, as if people won't still enjoy making music even if machines *could* do it better.
It's a neat toy, and nothing more. And if crappy pop music uses machines for a backing band, who would even notice? With that form of music, the background music is like the tires on your bike, you don't care about them until they blow. The teenies who buy that crap don't care about music, they are buying into a fantasy that they can be cool and popular and all the crap the pop icon represents. I'd bet that the musicians who back the likes of the Backstreet Boys and Britney and so forth hate it anyhow, they are probably being paid well to be musically bored to death. I feel sorry for those guys. It'd be such a drag to back up a bunch of no talent rich kids. Now, that's a perfect job for machines. Automate the mundane, do the interesting stuff.
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