Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates' Plan To Destroy Music, Note By Note
theodp writes "Remember Mr. Microphone? If you thought music couldn't get worse, think again. Perhaps with the help of R&D tax credits, Microsoft Research has spawned Songsmith, software that automatically creates a tinny, childish background track for your singing. And as bad as the pseudo-infomercial was, the use of the product in the wild is likely to be even scarier, as evidenced by these Songsmith'ed remakes of music by The Beatles, The Police, and The Notorious B.I.G.."
...it looks like an older generation MacBook Pro with a sticker over its logo.
Plausible deniability?
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
I like how, even with Gates gone, everything that happens at Microsoft is attributed to him. If he knew about this product, he would probably call it the dumbest fucking idea he's ever heard.
They didn't need to wait for this, and there's already a stop the music torture initiative.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
(But I kinda liked the biggie remix) /just a little. //ashamed
That version is just so horribly wrong (a depressed love song to a happy calypso tune) that it's pretty much impossible not to laugh or at least chuckle and shake your head at the results
Roxanne - The Calypso Version
Ohwait, yes, I do. This is Slashdot.
A friend of mine makes music, and whereas the tunes coming out from Songsmith are quite corny, it has helped him in getting some nice chords together.
Of course he is not literally using the music output from Songsmith, but I can see how it might help a lot more (amateur) music makers out there to see what chords can be used underneath their singing.
It's just a tool people: Don't think that the next Britney is going to use this... Come to think of it, her songs might even improve with it... Ok, the idea itself has already been around since about '96, and I also remember trying some software named "Whistler" that sortof did the same, only with you whistling. I'll leave you with an Songsmithed acapella David Lee Roth
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
In other news, Microsoft is notoriously bad at singing and advertising.
It is a damn interesting piece of shit software - i had a go: it would take any of my inane wailings and put some decently picked chords to it. Sure they they were played through some horrible GM sounds: but they tell you the chords (and the file format is just a renamed zip file with a .wma file and and xml file which contains all the chord info)
I don't know how good you are at listening to a monophonic sound source and deriving the key and related chords - but I suck at it. This software is a toy, but it doesn't mean you wont get something useful out of it!
It just worked.
On a side note, that was filmed in the Microsoft Research building, and many people there run OSX. Interestingly enough, you are allowed to use any platform you want as a Microsoft employee (I've even met Linux users who work there), but the Gates Foundation mandates you use only Microsoft products (source: friend who works for the foundation).
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
I think the Slashdot crowd is showing too much of its human side here, and not enough of the geeky analytics that bring me here.
As the old saying goes, it's not how well the bear dances, but that it dances at all. I watched the demo and thought that Songsmith must have some *very* interesting algorithms behind it. Sure, the music sounds trite to the human ear, but aren't you kind of amazed at how much is done?
To analogize, think of recognition technology. I can't tell one raccoon (or orangutang or giraffe or shrew) from another. Anyone who makes software that *can* do so has some mad skillz in my book, regardless of the human utility.
The Slashdot summary is absolute nonsense. It's like listening to complaints about MS Paint; that people are going to ruin their camera shots with its horrible tools.
This product is obviously not intended for the average Slashdot user, but rather to children, parties and whatnot. Furthermore, this tool has the potential of helping people understand how music is built up.
Personally, I think this is a really interesting idea and I wonder what the reception would look like if this was an iSongsmith product.
Full Tilt
That being said, the consensus here seems to be that (a) the results may leave something to be desired from an artistic standpoint, and (b) the marketing doesn't make most of us want to run out and buy this product. But in its current form I could see kids having fun with this software, and I'd be interested in seeing where it goes in the future.
There are technical matters that any musician can spot immediately as the markers of good music.
The problem is that the major labels, by means of marketing mostly, have convinced most people that what passes for popular is good and in order to revive part of their backlog catalogue they contend that bad music from the past is in reality full of invaluable classics.
Good popular music for has normally its roots firmly established in knowledge about previous musical styles, knowledge about modern techniques and perhaps, more importantly, a certain degree of social awareness (this is not to say that music should be political, but socially sensitive: Elvis was socially sensitive, as perhaps was Frank Sinatra up to a point, but Brittney Spears music isn't).
Lets put it this way: in the middle ages a troubadour that did not sing about the matters of the day would have starved to death, he would have also needed to know what fellow troubadours were doing and he would have got brownie points if he would have used popular lyrics from tunes heard in a religious service, all this would have been combined with technical competence to demonstrate dominion of the craft...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.