Microsoft Songsmith appeared as a fun surprise on the radar a while ago, causing music forums all over the net to spawn endless threads mocking or praising the software. 

If you have been living under an internet-less rock for a while, MS Songsmith is a software application that analyzes your singing, and creates an accompanying song. That is, it acts as a virtual band, trying to pick up your singing and fleshing it out to a full instrumented song. 

While the quality of the results vary, the idea itself is intriguing, and sets down a marker on pop culture science. Isaac Asimov once predicted small machines for home use that could generate endless streams of intriguing music. I’d take that over some commercial radio any day. So, how far away is it?

Obviously, someone would take a leap of imagination with this software.

And someone did, coming up with the brilliant idea to isolate the singer’s voice from classic songs, allowing Songsmith to recreate the song as interpreted! The results are at times mind-boggling. In the worst moments, we get karaoke renditions of “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson, but other results are eye-openers. We may laugh (and I did), but some of the versions actually opened my eyes on ideas to how new interpretations or re-mixes of songs could be made.

And that’s one way of using this type of technology – to liberate your notion of how a song “should sound” and give it a different context, giving a broader scope for different versions.

Judge for yourself. And have fun while doing it 🙂

Thanks to Retro Thing for finding this gem!