Well, Rose Hill Drive, YouTube has extended beyond the world of Guitar Hero to something far more strange. One of the latest fads on the website is taking a cappellas of songs and having Microsoft Songsmith insert the lyrics. The results range from surprisingly good to weird or creepy.
The software is supposed to be for songwriters, singing melodies on the fly and then having the program fit in the correct notes for the song. However, those darn YouTubers have co-opted the program’s usage for just about any pop song. Songsmith immediately appealed to me, as I have a certain fascination about the mechanical and mathematical nature of music and the fact that something so artful can be broken down to numbers, equations and formulas. Ultimately, these figures can be built back up into computer programs like Auto-Tune and Songsmith.
As a result, I’ve been forwarding these fascinating “works of science” (as opposed to works of art) to many of my friends for the LOL-value. The first response I heard back was simply, “I thought this was how pop songs were created already!” A lot of people just don’t get it, and it’s completely understandable.
Songsmith does turn pretty much every song into a generic, repetitive tune spewed forth from a Casio keyboard, but those instruments from the ’80s still inspire artists to this day. It isn’t despite their lo-fi, 8-bit sound, it is because of it. Artists found ways to use the Casio to its fullest extent and beyond, in ways the creators probably didn’t even imagine. Songsmith stumbled upon this genius even sooner. Yeah, it was intended to aid songwriters, but it’s become something completely co-opted in less than a year’s time. It’s easy to miss the unintentional genius.
TOPICS: poingly