Microsoft Songsmith. WTF.

Meemo · Jan 27, 2009

New York Times

Microsoft Songsmith Is Easy (if Painful to Hear)

By RANDALL STROSS
Published: January 24, 2009

CALLING all novice songwriters: Microsoft is pitching software designed for you, no musical training required. You sing the words as best you can, and its Songsmith software supplies computer-matched musical accompaniment.

Blogs have blasted the promotion for Songsmith, top. It calls to mind a past Microsoft video, a riff on â€œBorn in the U.S.A.â€ thatâ€™s all about selling Vista.

How satisfying are the musical results? Microsoft lets you hear for yourself in a promotional video titled â€œEveryone Has a Song Inside.â€ The video is getting more attention than the software because itâ€™s awful, in unintentional ways. â€œNotes on â€˜Campâ€™, â€ the 1964 essay by Susan Sontag, identifies a category of art that isnâ€™t campy, just â€œbad to the point of being laughable, but not bad to the point of being enjoyable.â€ The Songsmith video is exactly that.

Regardless of whether Songsmith sells well, the software will not have a material effect on Microsoftâ€™s earnings. But its marketing is of interest, because any time that Microsoft tells its own story clumsily, it calls attention to its inability to match the creativity of its smaller, nimbler rival, Apple.

Songsmith was released on Jan. 8, but hundreds of thousands of viewers have already sampled the Songsmith promotional video on YouTube, alerted by bloggers. â€œNothing Can Prepare You for the Microsoft Songsmith Commercialâ€ warns Videogum. â€œMicrosoft Songsmith: So Wonderfully Bad It Hurtsâ€ enthuses The Click Heard Round the World. â€œWorst Microsoft Video Promo Everâ€ is one description at TechCrunch.

The video consists of a minimusical whose soundtrack sounds as if it were generated by an inexpensive electronic keyboard. The story opens with a father, who â€” singing â€” says he needs to come up with an advertising campaign for glow-in-the-dark towels. Then we meet his daughter, who, while singing and typing on her laptop, shows him Songsmith, â€œthe cool new thing.â€ Dad then absconds with her laptop and introduces Songsmith to another adult, who speaks the words you will not want to miss: â€œMicrosoft, huh? So itâ€™s pretty easy to use?â€

The line is delivered without an I-know-you-know wink acknowledging that Microsoft is not the company likely to come first to mind when ease of use is mentioned. Songsmith works only on Windows, but the laptop in the video running Windows is a MacBook Pro, adorned with decorative stickers that obscure the Apple icon in the center.

The actor turns out to be Sumit Basu, a Microsoft research scientist, whose colleague, Dan Morris, another scientist, plays the role of the father. The two developed the software, along with Ian Simon, a graduate student at the University of Washington. The two also wrote the lyrics that they sang in the video â€” Songsmith supplied the rest of the music â€” and the production company wrote the dialogue, Mr. Morris said.

The pair had no intentions of producing satire. â€œWe just wanted to make a fun video,â€ Mr. Morris said. He and Mr. Basu are computer scientists, not professional writers or actors. They relinquished their amateur status, however, when they decided to commercialize Songsmith themselves.

That they did so is highly unusual. At Microsoft Research, technology that seems to have some commercial application is typically moved elsewhere in the company, to a product group, so it can be converted into a saleable product and overseen by professional marketers. I asked Mr. Morris if Songsmith had been turned down by Microsoft product groups outside of his division. He declined to answer, saying only that the core technology might still be used elsewhere in the company.

The researchers eschewed the various open-source licensing models that would seem well suited to a project like this and instead released it as a commercial package: $29.95 in the United States, 29 euros in the European Union. Mr. Morris said the revenue would help to recoup development costs.

If it had remained as it was â€” a research project called MySong that was the subject of academic papers â€” it would not have drawn derision. But once it was placed on sale in Microsoftâ€™s own online store, the whole world could weigh in with reviews.

The most devastating form of ridicule has been constructed by using the musical output of Songsmith itself. YouTube is now filling with hilarious videos in which the vocal tracks of rock classics have been fed into Songsmith and the ghastly computer-generated accompaniment has been recorded. One example was described by the blog Gizmodo: â€œDavid Lee Roth + Microsoft Songsmith = Pure Horror.â€

When TechCrunchâ€™s gadget blog first reported on the Songsmith video â€” â€œMicrosoft Relinquishes â€˜Worst Promo Video Everâ€™ Award to Another Department Within Microsoftâ€ â€” it referred to a Microsoft-produced video made last April, when Vista Service Pack 1 was released. More than a million YouTube viewers have looked at this video, â€œRockinâ€™ Our Sales,â€ an homage to the â€œBorn in the U.S.A.â€ album of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

I must speak up in defense of that Vista video. It was made only for internal purposes, to fire up the Microsoft sales force to sell more copies of Vista (â€œQuota is where your focus is; got-ta get those bonusesâ€). It is so self-conscious in its ridiculousness that itâ€™s impervious to external scorn.

Ms. Sontag also wrote that â€œwhen something is just bad (rather than Camp), itâ€™s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition.â€ Not this video. Hearing Bruce ServicePack and the Vista Street Band sing at full voice, one is treated to pure camp.

I canâ€™t offer the same apologia for Songsmithâ€™s output when it transmutes the rock canon into synthetic treacle. The most excruciating Songsmith output Iâ€™ve run across on YouTube is a result of feeding the software vocals of the Beatles song â€œSgt. Pepperâ€™s Lonely Hearts Club Band.â€ Listening to it, I wonder if software is now capable of thinking like a human being and can enjoy its own private jokes at our expense. If so, I suspect that Songsmith is snickering.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.
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To see how bad it is, go to youtube, search for songsmith and see the music it applied to existing songs.

Yizelin · Jan 27, 2009

dunno what you are talking about meemo, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmC28cXWqLc, was epic!... rofl

The Communist · Jan 27, 2009

That is funny! good try Microsoft...

Sirius · Jan 27, 2009

The concept sounds amusing, but it doesn't surprise me at all that it doesn't really work in practice.

Secksy · Jan 27, 2009

What if you just yell gibberish in the mic for 4 minutes?
Will Songsmith be able to keep up?

s o k a r · Jan 27, 2009

Does singing in the shower work?

EF2 · Jan 28, 2009

I think you have a typo in the thread title and meant "FTW".

Lev · Jan 28, 2009

Secksy said: ↑

What if you just yell gibberish in the mic for 4 minutes?
Will Songsmith be able to keep up?
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Only if it had death metal song accompaniment.

doctorie · Jan 29, 2009

Yizelin said: ↑

dunno what you are talking about meemo, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmC28cXWqLc, was epic!... rofl
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LOL metalica with box of seguls like tune

Molotof · Jan 29, 2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ScVTBg2vxk&feature=related

Secksy · Jan 29, 2009

Molotof said: ↑

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ScVTBg2vxk&feature=related
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This made me laugh so hard.
xD
Hill billy music! xD

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