A few weeks ago, I wrote about a new and interesting way some recording artists have started to use the internet: in an "if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em" move, several pop acts have decided to embrace the medium to the extent of making even the individual elements (the discrete instrumental and vocal parts that make up the recording as a whole) of some of their work freely available online.  The general public can download these ‘stems’, alter them, edit them, add new material, and put it all back together as a new (and hopefully interesting) creation of their own.

Completing the circle, these remixes can then be uploaded back onto the original artists’ websites, for sharing and commentary.

Just a few artists hosting public remix "contests": Radiohead , Mariah Carey , Franz Ferdinand , Third Eye Blind , and Nine Inch Nails …

And so you have fans, aspiring DJs, and recording studio professionals all sharing their creations side by side on the original artist’s website: a fundamental redefinition and flattening of of the artist/audience relationship, the composition/production relationship, and an obvious musical corollary to web 2.0 – ‘open source music’, if you will…


All well and good. But while that’s what the cool kids have been up to, along comes Microsoft Research with a decidedly uncool demo of their new $29.95 Songsmith application. This program will take a melody sung into your computer’s audio input and generate chords and accompaniment based on on the pitches it detects, the styles you select, and the settings of parameters with names such as "Happy" and "Jazzy" (more on the modeling and algorithms behind all that here) .
Whether or not this is an intriguing or a sadly misguided use of technology is open for discussion – what’s more interesting (to me, at least) are the cover versions of popular songs now starting to appear up on Youtube using the original vocal tracks as Songsmith input material. Some (such as this version of Oasis’ "Wonderwall") are almost musical – while others (such as this take on Van Halen) are just kind of cringe-inducing.


It would be all to easy to come down on Songsmith as fundamentally anti -musical (a lot of people have seen that unfortunate Microsoft demo video and done just that) – but consider this: if you believe (as I do) that a little play-time is healthy for us grownups too, what’s so bad about software that lets people have some fun with their computer creating these Soundsmith cover version/remixes?  Maybe they’ll be inspired to use the software to take it a step further and at least get at least a whiff of what it might be like to write a song on their own from scratch…

So while it might not be for everyone, I think Microsoft Songsmith is just fine, for what it is – unleashing the inner Moby within all the John Hodgman s out there…