Dok (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} cyberinsekt) wrote,@ 2009-05-30 01:00:00 |
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Microsoft SongSmith - Wonderwall
By now we have all come to love MS SongSmith for its bleak vision of a dystopian world where a smiling nuclear family spontaneously breaks out into song. It's a world where backing music is instantly created simply by the everyday household activity of singing into a microphone. Complex algorithms and hardware carry out what is surely the pinnacle of artistic achievement, that of creating bland and formulaic music. It makes you proud to share a species with the genius that created such a product.
Before SongSmith arrived, generative music had been a fascinating field full of audio oddities, a world inhabited by eccentric musicologists and maths spods. Brian Eno's 1996 software release Generative Music 1 with SSEYO Koan software introduced a wider audience to the world of possibilities that algorithmically generated music could offer. 200 years earlier, Mozart had done something similiar, with his dice-controlled Musikalisches Würfelspiel. But Microsoft brought computer-created music to the masses and gave them what they wanted: pap.
Never underestimate the power of humanity when it comes to subverting a bad idea. That's what Tim from mocksession.com did when he decided to start feeding actual vocal tracks from well-known songs into SongSmith, to see how they should sound in the ideal world. This then is the definitive, the real, the one true version of Oasis's Wonderwall. Bet you didn't know it was really a techno song.
Microsoft SongSmith - Wonderwall
(alternate download)
By now we have all come to love MS SongSmith for its bleak vision of a dystopian world where a smiling nuclear family spontaneously breaks out into song. It's a world where backing music is instantly created simply by the everyday household activity of singing into a microphone. Complex algorithms and hardware carry out what is surely the pinnacle of artistic achievement, that of creating bland and formulaic music. It makes you proud to share a species with the genius that created such a product.
Before SongSmith arrived, generative music had been a fascinating field full of audio oddities, a world inhabited by eccentric musicologists and maths spods. Brian Eno's 1996 software release Generative Music 1 with SSEYO Koan software introduced a wider audience to the world of possibilities that algorithmically generated music could offer. 200 years earlier, Mozart had done something similiar, with his dice-controlled Musikalisches Würfelspiel. But Microsoft brought computer-created music to the masses and gave them what they wanted: pap.
Never underestimate the power of humanity when it comes to subverting a bad idea. That's what Tim from mocksession.com did when he decided to start feeding actual vocal tracks from well-known songs into SongSmith, to see how they should sound in the ideal world. This then is the definitive, the real, the one true version of Oasis's Wonderwall. Bet you didn't know it was really a techno song.
Microsoft SongSmith - Wonderwall
(alternate download)
