Microsoft Research Labs has come up with some interesting software called Songsmith, and if you already haven't seen the web ad, here it is:
(Notice that even though this is an official Microsoft Research Labs video, everyone in the video is using a Mac... hmmmm)
Okay, I know what you're thinking. Is this for real? Sadly, it is. A small youtube phenomenon has cropped up in the past couple weeks; remixes of well-known songs using Songsmith, with new instrumentation, reapplied to the original music video. Many of these are just plain ridiculous, almost as ridiculous as MS Songsmith itself. Here are a couple my favorites.
Eye of the Tiger - Survivor
Running with the Devil - Van Halen
UPDATE: I've found a little bit more explanation about Songsmith. Leo Laporte explained the origin of the software in his podcast, TWIT (This Week in Tech). Apparently a couple of people from MS Research Labs pitched the software to MS, but they weren't ready to consider it a product (this is an interesting division in MS I wasn't aware of). So, the developers, on their own, hired a company to make the ad and apparently they made it available for sale on the MS Research Lab site. If you want to listen to the podcast, go to http://twit.tv/179 (the discussion is about 48 minutes in).
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Thanks for linking to my videos :-)
ReplyDeleteOMG! None of that can be for real! Are they marketing it to 10-year-olds? Thanks for this. I hadn't seen any of it.
ReplyDeleteadrienne, almost everybody i talk to this has the same first reaction... it's scary weird (maybe even more so than the seinfeld commercials)
ReplyDeleteyou can buy a copy of songsmith for $30 or install a free trial... i'm morbidly curious and might futz around with it!
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/songsmith/download.html