Things That Should Not Be (Songsmith Edition)

As the saying goes, everything can be made better with a liberal application of technology. With Guitar Hero and Rock Band making millions of people feel that they, too, could play music, even though they are, at best, doing an instrumental version of lip-syncing along with a recording, Microsoft Research throws Songsmith on the table in what they clearly feel is the answer to many people’s dreams—the dream of having a keyboard from the 80's back up your atrocious singing.

A visit to the home page takes you to a video that has no business being so damned huge to download or such high quality because it so awful as to defy description. If you make it through the whole video, you’re made of stronger stuff (than I). The software claims to “generate musical accompaniment to match a singer’s voice.” To test this little theory, a user at MetaFilter ran David Lee Roth’s vocal track from Running’ with the Devil by Van Halen through it, to come up with Runnin’ With The Songsmith. Songsmith is clearly not up to the task of generating anything but an 80's keyboard background accompaniment and the results are … interesting, to say the least. As one commenter neatly put it, “[t]his is simultaneously the best and the worst thing I have ever heard.”

If you’re interested in making your own music, try the David Lee Roth Runnin’ with the Devil Soundboard. It’s minutes of fun.