People who have talked about my work with Microsoft Songsmith lately:
But it turns out that YouTube’s azz100c is having fun with the program. Songsmith is a bit like karaoke meets Jive Bunny, the sort of record that can clear whole neighbourhoods of anyone with the least bit of musical taste. Basically, you “sing” any old rubbish and Songsmith provides an appropriate backing track. But it turns out that the program, launched at CES, does have a use. You can produce naff backing tracks for pop classics and run them behind the original video, to humorous effect. Roxanne, by The Police, is a typical example (above).
Who knew “Just What I Needed” was such a sad song? I mean, it’s a sad/angry song. But not this sad.
The wonderful Autopopmaschine Song Smith. YouTube users azz100c has extracted vocals known pop songs and song Smith can do the rest. The results are terribly beautiful, terrible plastic songs that are super safe in the next Microsoft Commercial make. Because they are so good fit for the company. Until now there is Oasis’ “Wonderwall” in the UmtzUmtzKirmestechno version, “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye as Schunkelpop, “Long Train Runnin ‘” by The Doobie Bros in test-tube radio, The Beatles’ “Sgt Pepper “in the solo entertainers blues version, and very bizarre: The Police” Roxane “in the solo entertainer-merengue remix.
The slowdown before the verses start again = best.
I’ve been following the emergence of a wonderful genre - Songsmith redoing classic tracks. If you haven’t heard about it, Microsoft’s new Songsmith software takes any vocal track you create and automatically generates a backing track. While it’s meant for kids to put music to their singing, enterprising individuals have been isolating vocal tracks from classic rock songs, feeding them into the software, and capturing the output. It’s a very twisted type of artificial intelligence. Forget Terminators, this is the way Skynet will take over the Earth.
There’s more to come, kiddos. I think this is the closest Entertainment Weakly will ever come to appearing in Entertainment Weekly.
