It might be for the ‘tweens, but daddy doing the jingle in the office…. groan in pain.

The ad is horrible, but the software is pretty cool… it is being marketed as a creative outlet for the masses, as you say, but in fact its written by and for musicians. It is very useful as a scratchpad tool to quickly and easily laydown melodies and then tinker with the chord progressions before finally exporting the MIDI to a high-end sequencing program like Ableton or something.

DaveS on January 16, 2009 at 5:50 PM

Just curious — do you know how it works? (serious un-snarky question) In general, with songwriting, the chord progression comes first, then the melody to fit. Songsmith seems to reverse that process. If a person comes up with a melody, without any clue re: chords, it’s hard for me to imagine a decent outcome. (Of course, the definition of “decent” varies from person to person.)

Yeah, you pick a tempo and a “genre”… the genre is used as a hint to the sorts of chord progressions that the software should generate. Additionally you can set a “happy” slider and a “jazzy” slider, to hint at the types of chords. 100% happy will give you lots along the lines of G-D-C-G etc, whereas 0% will give you lots of minor, darker chords. Jazziness results in more augmented choreds, 7ths, 9ths, etc.

You sing the melody into your mic to a beat in the tempo and time you chose (off-beat melody goes a long way toward explaining David Lee Roth, BTW). The software then will deduct key and modulations from the melody.

It’s actually pretty impressive, what they have managed to do here, but its a very early version. Hell, its still branded under the umbrella of Microsoft Research. (Then again, some really cool stuff is branded under Microsoft) Research).

DaveS on January 16, 2009 at 6:05 PM

Obviously Songsmith is just for having fun, not for doing serious creative work, but wouldn’t it still be true, though, that the average non-musician is not going to be able to pluck a melody out of thin air that will fit into any standardized chord progression, happy or not?

It doesn’t have to fit into a “standardized chord progression”. It’s just that in order to sound “good”, it has to be in something resembling a key, within the contraints of the tempo/time signature, etc. In other words, you need a given measure to be consistently in a key, for example. If you change keys, the generated chords will likely follow suit, which might sound crappy… if you are wanting to use some weird modes, you would have to go in and edit the generated chords to give you want you want.

I disagree, though, that it can’t be used for serious creative work. It’s useful for getting a rough song structure in place, tweaking/playing with particular chords, etc., and then you can export MIDI to some high-end sequencing software to do better instrumentation, or re-record vocals, or play instruments yourself, or whatever.

Its very, very useful as a sandbox or scratchpad.

DaveS on January 16, 2009 at 6:36 PM

Splashman on January 16, 2009 at 6:36 PM

Any rational person would think so, but if true how do you explain this?

You have better internal videos where you work? I think it’s hilarious.

DaveS on January 16, 2009 at 6:43 PM

;-)

DaveS on January 16, 2009 at 7:04 PM