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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.'"

23 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: 3, Insightful

      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
    2. Re:Hope they are not wasting much money on this. by D'Sphitz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. 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.

    4. 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.

    5. 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.
    6. Re:Hope they are not wasting much money on this. by Otter · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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...
    7. Re:Hope they are not wasting much money on this. by hobo+sapiens · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      blah blah blah
    8. Re:Hope they are not wasting much money on this. by PopeRatzo · · Score: 5, Funny

      Oh, look, some blond whore can screech into the mic


      Some Blond Whore is one of the best new bands out there. You should give them a listen.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
  2. Finaly, this is what the music companies needed! by arkham6 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!

  3. Shouldn't be too hard... by EaglemanBSA · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...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?
    1. Re:Shouldn't be too hard... by qengho · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Linkin Park songs...You'll be amazed at how different they aren't.

      Somebody took two songs, pitch-shifted one (and probably tweaked the timing a bit) and built an MP3 with one song in each speaker.

    2. Re:Shouldn't be too hard... by CompCons · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Shouldn't be too hard... by Skidge · · Score: 4, Funny

      Someone did the same with Nickelback (or some other similar crappy band) a few years ago.

      Ah-ha! Google found it for me:

      http://www.thewebshite.net/nickelback.htm

  4. Microsoft Idol. by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
    1. Re:Microsoft Idol. by Metasquares · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  5. Paging Spider Robinson... by Minwee · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  6. Yes, but... by Nerdposeur · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...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.

    1. Re:Yes, but... by Sciros · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You're absolutely correct on all points. The system will create "best guess" chord progressions, in any case. I assume it's able to create several guesses based on a probability threshold the user sets initially (probably something like "show me the top 5 most 'fitting' progressions").

      Based on what it's trained on, the system will show certain tendencies. If after training it's boxed up and given to a user to work with (no further training possibly by user), then the user will have to learn what these tendencies are and adjust accordingly.

      And yes, to not create total rubbish the singer will have to have some musical sense. Just like how a "language model" is used to pick out the most-likely-to-be-correct translation from a lattice that the translation model generates in statistical natural language translation systems, the singer might need to pick out what he/she desires out of a set of possibilities the music generation system presents.

      So, if your point was that this system will not be able to instantly fulfill an amateur singer's desires, then you're definitely right. Ideally the system would be able to be further trained on music the amateur singer personally enjoys (or wants to emulate), and would also learn from the choices the singer makes when selecting progressions generated by the system. Over time, then, it would do a better job of mapping the singer's vocals to what he/she wants to hear as an accompaniment.

      --
      I like basketball!!1!
    2. Re:Yes, but... by dkleinsc · · Score: 4, Interesting

      That is and it isn't true. As someone who's often responsible for improvising harmonies to match a melody, it's quite possible to provide an interesting harmony to a boring melody and vice versa.

      My personal favorite example here is the popular song "Turkey in the Straw". The traditional harmony goes something like this (assuming the key of C):
      verse: C-C-C-C-C-C-G-G-C-C-C-C-C-C-G-C
      chorus: C-C-C-C-F-F-F-F-C-C-C-C-C-C-G-C
      However, this is a very nice more complex harmony:
      verse: C-C-C-C-C-Am-Dm-G-C-G/D-C/E-C/E-F-D/F#-G-C
      chorus: C-C-C-C-F-F/E-Dm-G-C-D-D#dim-C/E-F-D/F#-G-C

      The melody works either way, but the harmonies are quite different.

      --
      I am officially gone from /. Long live http://www.soylentnews.com/
  7. Singing in Tune trick by Simonetta · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  8. MS likes Rhythm changes by MonkeyBoyo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  9. 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.