Microsoft Songsmith

» see research.microsoft.com/songsmith as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the songsmith ad is one of those things you saw before you knew what was being sold. january 2009, i was on ttnet broadband at home, with youtube open in another tab, and the link showed up in some msn window with no context. the cheesy infomercial with the awkward dad selling backing tracks from a cubicle. that was the cultural entry point for almost everyone, including me. nobody i knew installed it.

songsmith was a microsoft research project led by dan morris and sumit basu. you sang into the microphone and the software figured out the key, then it generated a backing track in whichever genre you picked. it shipped in january 2009 as a downloadable windows program with a 29-dollar price tag. version 1.03b landed in september 2012, and after that the project page slowly went into archive mode. by 2018 the regular installer was no longer on the live microsoft store.

the meme arrived two days in. somebody fed the isolated vocal track of bohemian rhapsody into songsmith and posted the result. the system rendered freddie mercury against a wedding-band shuffle that had no idea what to do with operatic dynamics. then came beatles isolations. then nirvana. the infomercial got featured on australia's the gruen transfer as a candidate for worst ad ever. by the end of week two the product had been redefined as a meme generator with a microsoft logo on it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

a research prototype that someone at microsoft decided to ship to consumers. that was the unusual move. msr ships papers and tech demos. songsmith was the rare case of msr putting a finished installer on a download page. it ran on windows xp through 7 and required dot net but did not need a gpu. the music it produced was bad in a way that was both the joke and the entire point of the project from a research angle: see how far chord prediction can go on cpu alone.

~ the meme ~

youtube was the venue. people fed in vocal-only acapella tracks from classic rock and pop. songsmith rendered awful lounge-jazz versions of bohemian rhapsody, sgt. pepper, smells like teen spirit, every easily-googleable isolated vocal track. the cheesy infomercial got re-cut with the songsmith rendition of whatever the cover was that week. by 2010 the meme had stopped being viral but the renditions stayed on youtube as the only thing anyone remembered about the product.

~ what came after ~

songsmith's core idea, generative chord accompaniment from a vocal track, became a real product class once gpu ai showed up. you can now do what songsmith tried to do in real time on a laptop, with results that are technically musical. dan morris and sumit basu kept publishing at msr. the lab moved on. the meme stayed.

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