wax&wires

Microsoft Releases Songsmith, Accompaniment Generator

Look what Guitar Hero started! As of this week, you can get celebrity music lessons from Apple, and now Microsoft has released a program that generates musical accompaniment with nothing more than your singing to guide it. The market for entry-level consumer music making tools is ever expanding, and I like it!

Songsmith is a PC program that retails for $30 and aims to make all users singer/songwriters. It generates musical accompaniment to match whatever the user sings into it. You simply choose a musical style, sing into the computer microphone, and let Songsmith put a band behind your vocals. As elementary as a lot of the generated music is, I really think this could help spark some creative juices in kids and teens. I doubt that our next top 40 hit is going to come from Songsmith, but if people’s musical appreciation is increased from it, it gets a good vote from me. At $30, it sure is priced right. There are also rumors of a Mac version coming out within the year.

You can watch a really cheesy video of it, as well as download a free demo, on Microsoft’s research site here.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 12:31 am. It is filed under wires and tagged with microsoft, software, songsmith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.