Microsoft Research discovers its inner Songsmith

Researchers at Microsoft have developed software that purports to do what many thousands of starving artists work at daily: write music. But Songsmith, according to its keepers, is all in good fun.

The program, announced Thursday at CES, generates musical accompaniment to a song sung into the computer microphone. Songsmith knows about several dozen musical styles, and adjusts its output accordingly -- selecting a reggae accompaniment will get you something different from the R&B results, for instance. The tempo can be tweaked to be peppier or slower, various instruments can be added or subtracted, and more knowledgeable users can make further adjustments.

It makes perfect sense if you think of music as a form of math -- the sung (or played) notes are waves to be processed, and the software selects appropriate harmonics. That means that the software doesn't really care if you can carry a tune; you might not get what you would expect from your key-of-R rendition of "Happy Birthday," but the software does not judge.

Neither do Dan Morris and Sumit Basu, Microsoft's lead researchers on this project. They're amateur musicians who "both have fun working on new songs," according to Morris, and they hope the software will give others a taste of the creative process. It's also hoped that human songwriters will find Songsmith to be a helpful 'electronic scratchpad' for playing around with ideas and forms. (Fear not; your PC has no designs on Open Mike Night at the coffeeshop.)

Try it for yourself, but we won't be held responsible for the neighbors' complaints. A trial version of the software is downloadable. A full-fledged version is available for $29.95.