The cruise ship version of Roxanne had me cackling with glee. Thank you times infinity for bringing this bit of hilarity to our attention.

I don’t know about song improvements, but setting Billy Idol to (what sounds like a close approximation of) bluegrass is the most fucking brilliant genre-twisting ever. Cheers, computer program.

On second thought, after hearing Songsmith’s version of Heard It Through the Grapevine, all of Nickelback’s songs could probably have been written by this program.

And yeah, it is pretty depressing to hear some of the greatest songs turned into The Most Boring Shit Ever.

Remember that cool Casio keyboard that had the pre-recorded rhythms and showroom sample programs? You could press “Samba” and a rollicking beat would issue forth and you’d sit there pretending to play because you were too lazy and foolish to have any musical talent of your own, and then you’d click on “Bossanova” just to really mix things up, but with the exception of an extra hollow “tink” on the half-beat, it was virtually identical to Samba button and right around then it dawned on you how completely unexceptional the whole thing was and for the first time in your thus-eight-full-years-of-existence you were beginning to realize how completely isolating and inhumane the world was, and how true love was perhaps just a illusion that the universe used to trick you into having babies and that your mother wasn’t really tired all those nights when she’d retire early to her bedroom, and you turned off the Casio keyboard and you went to your room and cried and swore you’d never hug your teddy bear again but then your dad knocked on the door and took you to Tast-e-freeze for a turtle sundae instead?

Me too.

Oh my god this is awesome. I love how The Police’s reggea influences are recognized and yet interpreted as some bizarre anglypso mash-up.

Really these are all so awesome. “White Wedding” works really well as bluegrass. I’d love to hear an actually good bluegrass interpretation. The brutally de-rocked “Eye of the Tiger” also actually kind of works on its own, as does the funk version of “Long Train Running”.

Oh my, that was the first time I’ve enjoyed Hotel California.  Ever.

I wonder what would happen if you sang some classic synth pop, like Human League?

Remember that cool Casio keyboard that had the pre-recorded rhythms and showroom sample programs? You could press “Samba” and a rollicking beat would issue forth and you’d sit there pretending to play because you were too lazy and foolish to have any musical talent of your own, and then you’d click on “Bossanova” just to really mix things up, but with the exception of an extra hollow “tink” on the half-beat, it was virtually identical to Samba button and right around then it dawned on you how completely unexceptional the whole thing was and for the first time in your thus-eight-full-years-of-existence you were beginning to realize how completely isolating and inhumane the world was, and how true love was perhaps just a illusion that the universe used to trick you into having babies and that your mother wasn’t really tired all those nights when she’d retire early to her bedroom, and you turned off the Casio keyboard and you went to your room and cried and swore you’d never hug your teddy bear again but then your dad knocked on the door and took you to Tast-e-freeze for a turtle sundae instead?

Me too.

Fuck, no. That thing was fun to mess around with! Yeah, something like 90 out of the 99 included beats sucked hard, but there were a few that were pretty fun to mess with. Still, I usually got bored after half an hour or so. What I never understood was how it could ever be remotely possible to do anything like what happened when you pressed the “Demo” button on that thing, unless you had eight arms.

Oh, and while many of those were funny, there was no saving the Beatles or (especially) the Cars from utter devastation - those ones just made me cringe.

Mighty Ponygirl: You had that Casio keyboard, too?

I actually love Hotel California - it’s the actor in me that never got fully realized. And even if my hubby weren’t a big Rush fan, that rendition just wouldn’t have worked. It’s as if Songsmith just grabbed the only tracks it had handy in the same range as Geddy’s voice, with no concept of transposition.

“I heard it through the grapevine”, OTOH, was hilarious.

I listened to all three of those? And. I feel pieces of my soul dying. “Wonderwall” might work better as techno if I could sever my ability to understand English.

If you old keyboard fans get a chance, check out a song called “80s Chords” by Rob Balder (the guy who does the webcomics PartiallyClips and Erfworld). Great stuff.

Anyway, all I can really say about Songsmith is that it’s a good thing nobody seems to be getting charged for it, because it’s a perfect example of how Microsoft creates the sort of products that seem like a good idea in the midst of a three-day stimulant-of-your-choice bender and make absolutely no sense by the time the public actually finds out about them. (I still remember their idea of a smart kitchen. Given that it was a Microsoft project, I can only imagine what kind of backflips you’d have to go through to get your own recipes in the system, never mind sharing them with someone else.)

I fell in love with these babies when I saw them in thrift stores when I was in my teens :

Tone generation

Additive synthesis

The original Hammond organ imitated the function of a pipe organ’s ranks of pipes in multiple registers by using additive synthesis of waveforms from harmonic series to generate its sounds. The Hammond organ’s individual waveforms are made by mechanical tonewheels which rotate in front of electromagnetic pickups. Although they are generally included in the category of electronic organs, original Hammond organs are, strictly speaking, electric or electromechanical rather than electronic organs because the waveforms are produced by mechanical tonewheels rather than electronic oscillators. Hammond organs use 96 tonewheels. Five of these are blanks, only present in order to balance out the rotating mechanical sub-assemblies. Thus the tonewheel assembly generates 91 frequencies, which are all that are required for the entire organ. The appropriate frequency outputs, nine per key, are routed to the key contacts for each note on the keyboards.

Drawbars

The component waveform ratios are mixed by sliding drawbars mounted above the two keyboards, which operate like the faders on an audio mixing board. When a drawbar is incrementally pulled out, it increases the volume of its component waveform. When pushed all the way in, the specified component wave form becomes absent from the mix. The labelling of the drawbar is derived from the stop system in pipe organs where the physical length of the pipe corresponds to the pitch produced. Hammond drawbars are set up in groups of nine arranged as follows:

16’    1 octave below fundamental
5 1⁄3’    a fifth above fundamental
8’    fundamental
4’    1 octave above fundamental
2 2⁄3’    1 octave and a fifth above fundamental
2’    2 octaves above fundamental
1 3⁄5’    2 octaves and a major third above fundamental
1 1⁄3’    2 octaves and a fifth above fundamental
1’    3 octaves above fundamental

Each of the drawbars has a range of 0 (off) to 8 (full on) and can be modified in real-time, allowing changes to be made while a song is being played. A given combination of drawbar settings creates a unique timbre, and is referred to as a registration. Registrations are notated using a 9-digit sequence where each digit corresponds to the level of its respective drawbar.

Presets

In addition to drawbars, many Hammond tonewheel organ models also include presets, which allow defined drawbar combinations to be made available at the press of a button. Full Console organs such as the B-3 and C-3 models have a number of reverse coloured keys (naturals are black, sharps/flats are white) to the left of each manual, with each key activating a preset. The two right-most preset keys (B and Bb) activate the corresponding left or right set of drawbars for that manual, while the other preset keys produce pre selected drawbar settings that are internally wired. The far left key (C), also known as the cancel key, de-activates all presets, and results in no sound coming from that manual.

Other Hammond models such as the M-100 and L-100 series have flip tabs for presets, situated across the top of the organ. The left hand flip tab reverts to the tone set by the drawbars. Some models such as the M, M-2 and M-3 spinet organs have only drawbars, and no presets, but after market products such as the Duet Sixteen, manufactured by the now defunct Electro Tone Corporation can be added to give preset functions.

Sorry, but I must disagree.  Wonderwall is still as painful to listen to as it was when it was blasted all over college campuses back in the day.  Why and how Oasis’ Wonderwall ever became a popular hit with the grating whiny vocals…I’ll never understand. 

Here’s a few suggestions of songs which may be improved by MS Songsmith:

Barney’s “I love you”

Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby”....or his entire “To The Extreme Album” for that matter

Spice Girls’ “Wannabe”

Anything by the Beegees…or almost everything from the popular disco genre….

They should also expose the entire Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Jazz musical genres to the MS Songsmith treatment…...I wonder if most of those who consider themselves socially superior to most of us here will really notice the difference…...

That Hotel California was fun. 

People in Asia seem to love that song.  When I first came to Singapore, John and Belle took me to the Botanical Gardens, where we went over a hill and suddenly saw an orchestra playing it in an amphitheater surrounded by water.  I heard it in Thailand too. 

Are you now moved to take up the White Hipster’s burden?

The shitty lounge-singer version of “Running With the Devil” is hilarious. I can’t stop giggling.

They should also expose the entire Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Jazz

FWIW, The Roches did a dynamite a cappella of the “Hallelujah Chorus” on SNL lo on 30 years ago, it would be worth running through to see if it would turn into “Light Baroque”.

Ponygirl:

Actually Songsmith is just using some version of the Band-in-a-Box engine, licensed from PG Music, to turn its chord sequences into MIDI sequences, so that part is nothing new or unusual and is indeed basically the same thing as Casio keyboard auto-accompaniments, etc.  The new part, and Microsoft Research’s original contribution, is just the algorithm to suggest backing chord sequences based on vocal melodies. 

BrianX:

“a computer to store your recipes” is a PC marketing cliche that dates back at least four decades:

“The Kitchen Computer was featured in the 1969 Neiman Marcus catalog as a $10,600 tool for housewives to store and retrieve recipes. Unfortunately, the user interface was only binary lights and switches. There is no evidence that any Kitchen Computer was ever sold. Inside was a standard Honeywell 316 minicomputer, billed as the first 16-bit machine at that price from a major computer manufacturer.”

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=927&st=1

Wonderwall really does work better as techno.  I’d probably tone down the “happy hardcore” vibe and throw in some synth lines from the original melody.

Damn, premature blasphemation.  Radiohead’s Creep is priceless.

“Hotel California”, which now sounds like a fun lo fi New Wave song:

More cowbell!!

Seriously, someone needs to tell the programmers at Microsoft that most songs have bridges.

I’m gonna go all interweb-meta and ask someone to songsmithify Never Gonna Give You Up.

So, basically Microsoft came up with a program that makes elevator music? Awesome.

I always did feel incredibly sad for the poor people reduced to producing that stuff for a living—it’s like they almost had talent, almost had a career, but something went horribly wrong somewhere along the way. Now that computers have taken over that odious task, these people can finally let their pathetic dreams of Making It as a Rock Star die quietly and peacefully with some degree of dignity, and go on to become accountants or civil servants or something. Thank you, Microsoft! I look forward to hearing these charming covers again the next time I’m on hold.

@MH: Your wish has been granted.

Roxanne is a huge improvement; of course, it would be better still if they replaced the vocal track.  And the lyrics.  Shit, just throw the fucking piece of shit song in the garbage and be done with it.

My boyfriend and I have decided the White Wedding one is great. Perhaps not better than the original, but like BStu, we’d like to hear an actual bluegrass cover.

Of the 100-some blog posts that have been made about my “Classic Hits by Microsoft Songsmith” series, this is my absolute favorite.

Thanks for linking to my videos, and thanks for the compliments. MH, you asked for a Never Gonna Give You Up Songsmith version—I posted it today. http://www.youtube.com/azz100c

I find myself incredibly tempted to download the trial JUST so I can plug in some Weird Al - if I put parody IN, do I get real music BACK?