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Microsoft Songsmith Is Easy (if Painful to Hear)

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By RANDALL STROSS
Published: January 24, 2009

CALLING all novice songwriters: Microsoft is pitching software designed for you, no musical training required. You sing the words as best you can, and its Songsmith software supplies computer-matched musical accompaniment.
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Photographs from YouTube

Blogs have blasted the promotion for Songsmith, top. It calls to mind a past Microsoft video, a riff on “Born in the U.S.A.” that’s all about selling Vista.
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How satisfying are the musical results? Microsoft lets you hear for yourself in a promotional video titled “Everyone Has a Song Inside.” The video is getting more attention than the software because it’s awful, in unintentional ways. “Notes on ‘Camp’, ” the 1964 essay by Susan Sontag, identifies a category of art that isn’t campy, just “bad to the point of being laughable, but not bad to the point of being enjoyable.” The Songsmith video is exactly that.

Regardless of whether Songsmith sells well, the software will not have a material effect on Microsoft’s earnings. But its marketing is of interest, because any time that Microsoft tells its own story clumsily, it calls attention to its inability to match the creativity of its smaller, nimbler rival, Apple.

Songsmith was released on Jan. 8, but hundreds of thousands of viewers have already sampled the Songsmith promotional video on YouTube, alerted by bloggers. “Nothing Can Prepare You for the Microsoft Songsmith Commercial” warns Videogum. “Microsoft Songsmith: So Wonderfully Bad It Hurts” enthuses The Click Heard Round the World. “Worst Microsoft Video Promo Ever” is one description at TechCrunch.

The video consists of a minimusical whose soundtrack sounds as if it were generated by an inexpensive electronic keyboard. The story opens with a father, who — singing — says he needs to come up with an advertising campaign for glow-in-the-dark towels. Then we meet his daughter, who, while singing and typing on her laptop, shows him Songsmith, “the cool new thing.” Dad then absconds with her laptop and introduces Songsmith to another adult, who speaks the words you will not want to miss: “Microsoft, huh? So it’s pretty easy to use?”

The line is delivered without an I-know-you-know wink acknowledging that Microsoft is not the company likely to come first to mind when ease of use is mentioned. Songsmith works only on Windows, but the laptop in the video running Windows is a MacBook Pro, adorned with decorative stickers that obscure the Apple icon in the center.

The actor turns out to be Sumit Basu, a Microsoft research scientist, whose colleague, Dan Morris, another scientist, plays the role of the father. The two developed the software, along with Ian Simon, a graduate student at the University of Washington. The two also wrote the lyrics that they sang in the video — Songsmith supplied the rest of the music — and the production company wrote the dialogue, Mr. Morris said.

The pair had no intentions of producing satire. “We just wanted to make a fun video,” Mr. Morris said. He and Mr. Basu are computer scientists, not professional writers or actors. They relinquished their amateur status, however, when they decided to commercialize Songsmith themselves.

That they did so is highly unusual. At Microsoft Research, technology that seems to have some commercial application is typically moved elsewhere in the company, to a product group, so it can be converted into a saleable product and overseen by professional marketers. I asked Mr. Morris if Songsmith had been turned down by Microsoft product groups outside of his division. He declined to answer, saying only that the core technology might still be used elsewhere in the company.

The researchers eschewed the various open-source licensing models that would seem well suited to a project like this and instead released it as a commercial package: $29.95 in the United States, 29 euros in the European Union. Mr. Morris said the revenue would help to recoup development costs.

If it had remained as it was — a research project called MySong that was the subject of academic papers — it would not have drawn derision. But once it was placed on sale in Microsoft’s own online store, the whole world could weigh in with reviews.

The most devastating form of ridicule has been constructed by using the musical output of Songsmith itself. YouTube is now filling with hilarious videos in which the vocal tracks of rock classics have been fed into Songsmith and the ghastly computer-generated accompaniment has been recorded. One example was described by the blog Gizmodo: “David Lee Roth + Microsoft Songsmith = Pure Horror.”

When TechCrunch’s gadget blog first reported on the Songsmith video — “Microsoft Relinquishes ‘Worst Promo Video Ever’ Award to Another Department Within Microsoft” — it referred to a Microsoft-produced video made last April, when Vista Service Pack 1 was released. More than a million YouTube viewers have looked at this video, “Rockin’ Our Sales,” an homage to the “Born in the U.S.A.” album of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

I must speak up in defense of that Vista video. It was made only for internal purposes, to fire up the Microsoft sales force to sell more copies of Vista (“Quota is where your focus is; got-ta get those bonuses”). It is so self-conscious in its ridiculousness that it’s impervious to external scorn.

Ms. Sontag also wrote that “when something is just bad (rather than Camp), it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition.” Not this video. Hearing Bruce ServicePack and the Vista Street Band sing at full voice, one is treated to pure camp.

I can’t offer the same apologia for Songsmith’s output when it transmutes the rock canon into synthetic treacle. The most excruciating Songsmith output I’ve run across on YouTube is a result of feeding the software vocals of the Beatles song “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Listening to it, I wonder if software is now capable of thinking like a human being and can enjoy its own private jokes at our expense. If so, I suspect that Songsmith is snickering.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

DPDarkPrimus wrote:I don't listen to music radio stations any more so I've never had the misfortune of listening to "Soldier Boy" but I was of the impression that he was a rapper... and isn't that kind of their thing - talking rhythmically?

MRDOD wrote:Think about if anybody could make good music.

The entire concept of bands would have to be rethought.

Personally I'd love to have a program that you could feed a movie script into and it would autogenerate and render a whole movie for you. I don't think you'd need general AI for that, just some moderately radical reasoning technology a lot of effort engineering an appropriate knowledge base and content library.

Zixinus wrote:On the note, that's somehow how I imagine post-AI art a bit. The AI does the heavy lifting by creating environments, scenes, human body characters, etc. However, human artists work out smaller details, like irregularities with a character's clothing or giving more dramatic camera angles or whatever. Essentially, the artists run around doing artistic things that the are good at.

MRDOD wrote:

DPDarkPrimus wrote:I don't listen to music radio stations any more so I've never had the misfortune of listening to "Soldier Boy" but I was of the impression that he was a rapper... and isn't that kind of their thing - talking rhythmically?

But it's not rhythmic or related to the music at all save in 1 or 2 parts. He's just talking. The music could have been added later in postproduction for all we'd know- if I didn't know it was a song and was hearing it with just the microsoft-made audio or no music at all I'd just think he was talking to someone saying sentences that didn't make sense instead of rapping lyrics that didn't make sense.

Singer wrote:I imagine these are the songs heard on the elevator to hell.

Not included above, this one sounds like a horrendous remix:
Enter Songsmith

Edit:
Holy hell, listen to Battery.