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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.'"
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.
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!
...considering how unimaginitive most bands are today - the 1-4-5-1 progression is so prevalent in pop music, you can hum most songs on the radio within the first two minutes of listening to it.
Experiment: pick three Linkin Park songs (from their frist couple of albums), play the first, and sing the melody from the second or third over it. You'll be amazed at how different they aren't.
Quiz: True or False -- On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your middle name?
So who is to blame if a song input from a user results in a generation of notes that is already has a copyright?
That's about what I was thinking. Actually the first thoughts out of my head were:
"Oh, for fuck's sake! Is creating and playing music really that fucking hard?" I mean, people have been doing this shit for CENTURIES, folks! Millennia even!
I can just see it now:
Seacrest: Welcome to Microsoft Idol! And welcome to tonight's first contestant, Sanjaya! In our last round, Sanjaya blue-screened our backup computer band....can he make a comeback tonight? Let's find out!
My blog
Sure, first you reduce every song to a sequence of twelve standard notes. Then you start applying regular expressions to match the patterns, and before long it's meloncholy elephants everywhere.
...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.
what ever happened to talent like ELP or Boston
"I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
I 'discovered' that the best way to sing in tune (with recordings, or a group) is to cup one hand about one foot (@30cm) in front of your mouth and cup the other hand behind one of your ears.
While singing, your voice bounces off the hand in front of your mouth and then gets redirected into your ear. Then you can adjust the pitch of your voice to harmonize with that of the recording. This really makes a difference in your ability to sing in tune.
I thought that this was my secret trick until I saw the BeeGees on television long ago and Robin Gibb was using the same 'hand behind ear' technique to get his complex falsetto parts just right. The studio monitor fed his voice towards his ears.
I know, I know, the BeeGees, don't laugh, during the years 1975 to 1979 they were best male ensemble vocalist group in the popular music world. Dorks maybe by current standards, but who are Slashdaughters to judge in that regard?
Anyway, I realize that the last thing a Slashdot reader will ever do is sing. But most Slashdot readers have an obsession with doing things right, should the need ever arise, then in regards to singing, this is how it can be done right.
I suspect that this Microsoft program, like all Microsoft pop culture products, will go nowhere and die a slow, embarrassing death should it ever get released. It sounds to me (bad pun) like the auto-play features found on those plastic WalMart keyboards that are too cheap and dumb to have MIDI ports included on the back. Microsoft should put this code into open-source and take a tax write-off on the development costs.
And speaking of which, just exactly WHY is Microsoft researching automatic computer music product generation? If I recall correctly, don't they make personal computer operating systems and business software. I guess that it must be that since they found and eliminated all the bugs in their primary products that they were looking for a new challenge. And they want to get some of the glory that is coming from the Rock Star plastic button guitar weirdness that is currently popular among the less-musically-inclined sector of the population.
Was: "Researchers Create an Automatic Backup Band for Singers"
Correct Version: "Researchers Create a BAD Automatic Backup Band for BAD Singers"
OK. That was silly of me. But, I do have to say that if all music in the future was created like this, I'd probably stab myself in the ears. It's early in this game though... I suspect that once the concepts of the software are ironed out, the addition of more interesting chord progressions will happen. I'm still wondering how real musicians would wind up finding any use for this?
I've been using computer based music sequencers since the mid 80s and I think the last thing any real musician wants to see is "Microsoft Composer". I can see it now, instead of Clippy, they'll have "Wolfy" which will be a horrid caricature of Mozart appear every time you start to create a song:
1. You make something using minor 7ths and 9ths and Wolfy shows up, "I see you're writing an 'unhappy' song, would you like to make your song happy"?
2. You start sequencing something very abstract and atonal and this is the way you've worked on music for nearly three decades, up pops Wolfy, "It looks like you're having trouble getting started, would you like me to show you how to do a basic major C chord progression"?
3. You start inputing some heavy polyrhythms, and Wolfy butts in again, "Your song appears to be too rhythmically different, do you need help with a standard 4/4 beat"?
Ugh... more and more reduction to the lowest common denominator. Back in high school a friend and I came to the conclusion that all highly popular music would eventually be one note surrounded by 4/4 beats and grunts for lyrics. This software certainly seems to be taking things in that direction.
I keed I keed.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
All I do, every day, is music. I am majoring in music and I don't have any GEs this quarter - I spend all my daytime surrounded by it. As such I LOVE helping non-majors with their music GE homework or talking to people about music (and not just "such and such music is good" but we discuss our OWN ideas on music that WE wrote). Now from that stand point this is absolutely awful. Why would they come and take a class for fun, learning, social interaction, and sell-fulfillment when they can belt into a computer mic like an over-sexed jackass? This is hardly "getting a taste of music creation" and it's just going to encourage people to continue to ignore music culture as a whole. Please don't spend money on this software so you can scream wildly and make a hardly listenable tune. Take that SAME money and free time and go buy a couple of lessons from a local guitarist/pianist/clarinetist/whateverist. The majority of us "classically trained musicians" aren't nearly as snooty and erudite as culture would have us look - we WANT to share this gift with you guys.
"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.
It would be interesting (well, at least to me) to see this technology run in connection with Yamaha's Vocaloid technology. Vocaloid, as Wikipedia puts it, "is a singing synthesizer application software developed by the Yamaha Corporation that enables users to synthesize singing by just typing in lyrics and melody."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocaloid
The English version doesn't work very well, but the Japanese version called "Hatsune Miku" doesn't sound all that much worse than the average pop idol. That, admittedly, isn't saying much, but it's a neat little thing in a way. Well, to me.
If both were used in concert with one another, we'd have a wholly computer-generated voice being accompanied by a wholly computer-generated backup band. The human intervention comes in with the user typing the lyrics in, however.
If somebody asks to be accompanied on an unknown song, most musicians will initially try the 4 chord progression known as Rhythm changes (named for Gershwin's "I've got Rhythm"). Often it works, and in listening to MS kludge it seems they likes their Rhythm changes.
Has anyone set this to "Developers! Developers! Developers!" yet?
"Since people rarely sing at precise frequencies".. As any f-transform will tell you a human voice is going at about an infinite number of different sized, distinct sin waves. Maybe I just have a huge pet peave when I hear things like this because the only thing that actually produce a single frequency is an object. Human voices never do... in fact 2 people singing with the same note have different sin patterns... anyway
As a music teacher, it is your paid duty to believe and repeat to students that everyone can play music. Have you ever considered the possibility that this is a lie? Have you ever considered that some people are made for certain things and others aren't? Everything is not for everyone. Singing karaoke makes someone a singer as much as Guitar Hero makes someone a guitar player as much as Madden 08 makes someone a football player.
There's this notion of talent and notion of passion. These two go hand in hand. A person has a talent for music, and it is their passion that carries them through to bring this talent to fruition. Does it take a fancy piece of software to help someone discover this talent? Last time I checked, singing started with an open mouth and an "Aaahhh."
Is it elitist for me to believe this? I don't think so. Yes, I am a musician. I started with the clarinet in the 2nd grade and became the youngest player in advanced band. When my friend was trying to learn/play trumpet in 5th grade, he struggled with Mary Had a Little Lamb after several weeks; I picked it up once and played it through. Since then, I learned guitar, bass, piano, and drums. I only took lessons for guitar, the rest are self-taught.
Yes, it takes time and practice, but it also takes talent, and I believe this is something that is natural. I've tried different sports but was never any good. My dad has tried to teach me about cars but I've never had any interest. In an increasingly isolated world, we're starting to forget that everyone in society fits a certain piece of the puzzle that makes up that society. We try to be everything all of the time when we don't need to be. If my car breaks down, I can have my dad work on it. In turn, when he can't fix a computer problem, he can turn to me. When a guitar player needs a beat, he can meet up with a drummer and jam. When a singer needs backing vocals, he or she can meet like-minded individuals and form a group. We have the internet now to make this more possible, yet we seem to be going the opposite direction and disconnecting from everyone else, trying to forge our own miniature frontiers in our homes and apartments.
Let the singers sing, let the musicians play music, let the athletes play sports...we are individual parts of a whole, not whole individuals.
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.