Like to Write Music?
(addition to news story below, so please read that one first)
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Most folks never get a chance to answer this question, since writing music takes years of experience... if you don't play an instrument or spend lots of time around music, you'll probably never get to write a song.

MySong, introduced in our CHI 2008 paper, automatically chooses chords to accompany a vocal melody, allowing a user with no musical training to rapidly create accompanied music. MySong is a creative tool for folks who like to sing but would never get a chance to experiment with creating real original music. Come on, you know who you are... you sing in the car, or in the shower, or you go to karaoke clubs, or you just once in a while find yourself singing along with catchy commercial jingles. MySong is also a great tool for songwriters who want to quickly experiment with melodies and accompaniments.

And just a quick word on what MySong isn't, particularly in response to the various forum posters who are (appropriately) very suspicious of anyone who thinks songwriting can be automated. MySong does not automate songwriting. No one will ever write, record, and produce a top-40 hit with any version of MySong. What MySong does do is give many folks who would never even taste songwriting a great opportunity to just get a glimpse of music creation. Is the output from MySong ready for radio? No. But is it more than good enough, when coupled with a style-based arrangement tool (i.e. when not using just the simple piano part you hear in our video) to give someone a feeling that they've created something musical for the first time? Absolutely. Is it more than good enough to make a cute birthday song for Mom or a Valentine's Day song for your significant other, even if you don't play an instrument? Absolutely.

Furthermore, for songwriters, is MySong going to replace the craft of songwriting? Never. Could it be a super-useful scratchpad for exploring new melodies and ideas? Definitely. If you're a songwriter, you've probably had the experience of coming up with a melody and finding the nearest object with a ˇ°recordˇ± button on it just to get your idea down. Imagine that first quick experience also letting you explore some chords and styles... lots of songwriters have told us they'd love to have that! Then of course you'd work with other tools, other people, instruments, etc. to really develop a song, but this could be a great tool that lets you play with new melodies in places where you couldn't before (on the go, on the bus, in the airport, etc.).

Now before we get to all the detailed examples and results, let's finally hit you with a typical audio example of something created with MySong. Here a singer just sang into MySong, twiddled some sliders, and pressed ˇ°playˇ±; we also show you the results we get when we take our chords and fire them through Band-in-a-Box, a style-based arrangement tool that takes chords as input.

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This is a fascinating article, and gives an insight into where computers are music are headed, with implications for the future of karaoke. Read the whole article here:
http://research.microsoft.com/
dan/mysong/
Submitted by David on 08-04-2008

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