20090116   

Microsoft Research's SongSmith does the classics

Michael considered fate at 18:12   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

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Comment posted by  Anonymous @ 1/16/2009 7:30 PM:

Very very very interesting. Especially as I had seen earlier today some neat YouTube stuff about Joe Satriani suing Coldplay because their new song sounds like one of his....and then I found out Led Zep ripped off such hits as Dazed and Confused and even the intro to Stairway to Heaven!
The copyright implications alone are kind of funny..... 

I'm sure some of you are already familiar with this, but Microsoft has a new research project called Songsmith:

Songsmith generates musical accompaniment to match a singer’s voice. Just choose a musical style, sing into your PC’s microphone, and Songsmith will create backing music for you.

Except that isn't what people are doing with it, at least not some of them. They are isolating classic song vocal tracks and piping them through Songsmith instead.

And it is creepy:

It started out with a little David Lee Roth, which is fairly hideous.

And then there is the Police's Roxanne re-incarnated as a Caribbean hit.

There are plenty more, like Oasis' Wonderwall, but I won't bore you. You can dig into it if you find it interesting, or, hey, go sing a song yourself.

Update: I think Long Train Runnin by the Doobie Bros is the best so far.