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Researchers Create an Automatic Backup Band for Singers
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Apr 07, 2008 11:47 AM
from the william-hungs-of-the-world-unite dept.
from the william-hungs-of-the-world-unite dept.
Researchers at Microsoft Labs are hoping to allow untrained singers to have their own automatic backup band in the near future. A new piece of software, "MySong", promises to take a sung melody and using a probability computation algorithm, generate an appropriate chord accompaniment. There is also a video of the process on the Microsoft Labs website. "'The idea is to let a creative but musically untrained individual get a taste of song writing and music creation,' Morris told New Scientist. 'There was nothing out there that could take a sung vocal melody as an input and then generate appropriate chords to accompany it. [...] Since people rarely sing at precise frequencies, MySong compares a sung melody to the 12 standard musical notes. It then feeds an approximate sequence of notes to the system's chord probability computation algorithm. This algorithm has been trained, through analysis of 300 rock, pop, country and jazz songs, to recognize fragments of melody and chords that work well together, as well as chords that complement each another.'"
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Hope they are not wasting much money on this. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hope they are not wasting much money on this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Re:Hope they are not wasting much money on this. (Score:5, Informative)
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If you want music that matches your tastes, look for it. Don't bitch that the local sheepmart doesn't carry it. Sheepmarts cater to sheep. If you aren't willing to be a sheep then don't bitch about the fact that the selection isn't tailored for you.
If you honestly CAN'T figure out how to look for it, then you need to turn in your nick.
Re:Hope they are not wasting much money on this. (Score:5, Informative)
I've played with software in the past that promised to build backing tracks "automatically". There's a pretty neat one called "The Jammer Pro", for example, or the more rudimentary "Band in a Box" software.
The thing is, you still have to make musical decisions as to which portions of what they generate you'd like to keep, which you'd like to delete, and which give you some good ideas, but need "tweaking" to make the best use of them.
The Jammer Pro, for example, would let you drag and drop in a "session rock guitarist" for example, and would write electric guitar solos to go along with the chord changes and tempo you specified as the "core" of your song. Some of these were really good! But you had to audition everything it made, and hit "redo" a lot to discard ones that weren't so good, before it came up with something that was a "keeper".
I really don't envision a computer creating perfect "backing tracks" in real-time to any vocals sung into it. It's more like, it'll sometimes/often make "passable" ones, fun for karaoke or practicing -- but not worthy of recording.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Given that pop music is already arguably not worthy of recording, I'm not exactly sure that there's any impediment to this being used for pop music.
Re:Hope they are not wasting much money on this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Machines cannot replace musicians. Music is emotional. It is improv. It is creative. Machines do as they are told, and even if they have some complex AI going on, they can still only function according to the parameters they are given. And since a human has to program the machine, the machine cannot be a better musician than the person or persons who programmed it. There is a difference between playing chords to a song and making it your own. Think of all the jazz standards, for example. How many different versions are there of, for example, Misty? Countless. Or how many songs use Gershiwn's "Rhythm" changes? Check this out: http://songtrellis.com/changesPage [songtrellis.com]. Lots of chord changes there. But each version of each song is unique. Music is art. It's not about who is technically "better" or who plays the changes perfectly; oftentimes it the deviations from perfection that can make a song so compelling. Until someone makes a machine with the ability to improvise in response to the lead singer or soloist, convey emotion, *enjoy* music, and discover new things through taking risks and making mistakes, musicians won't become obsolete whatever that means, as if people won't still enjoy making music even if machines *could* do it better.
It's a neat toy, and nothing more. And if crappy pop music uses machines for a backing band, who would even notice? With that form of music, the background music is like the tires on your bike, you don't care about them until they blow. The teenies who buy that crap don't care about music, they are buying into a fantasy that they can be cool and popular and all the crap the pop icon represents. I'd bet that the musicians who back the likes of the Backstreet Boys and Britney and so forth hate it anyhow, they are probably being paid well to be musically bored to death. I feel sorry for those guys. It'd be such a drag to back up a bunch of no talent rich kids. Now, that's a perfect job for machines. Automate the mundane, do the interesting stuff.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As a programmer, I can tell you that oftentimes the results a good program generates surprise even the author.
And as a GOOD programmer I can tell you that the results of a GOOD program come as no surprise to me because that's how I intended it to work!
As for music generation, someone said that music is emotional and yadda yadda. What the? Have you listened to any modern "music" lately? It's all the same shit with the same whiny lyrics about either drugs or sex and it's generally terrible.
Good music is coming harder and harder to find. The Internet was supposed to open up new roads to finding music but instead
Microsoft Idol. (Score:5, Funny)
"Oh, for fuck's sake! Is creating and playing music really that fucking hard?" I mean, people have been doing this shit for CENTURIES, folks! Millennia even!
I can just see it now:
Seacrest: Welcome to Microsoft Idol! And welcome to tonight's first contestant, Sanjaya! In our last round, Sanjaya blue-screened our backup computer band....can he make a comeback tonight? Let's find out!
Parent
Re:Microsoft Idol. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Hope they are not wasting much money on this. (Score:5, Funny)
Some Blond Whore is one of the best new bands out there. You should give them a listen.
Parent
Re:Hope they are not wasting much money on this. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Hope they are not wasting much money on this. (Score:5, Informative)
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Finaly, this is what the music companies needed! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Finaly, this is what the music companies needed (Score:2)
Shouldn't be too hard... (Score:4, Interesting)
Experiment: pick three Linkin Park songs (from their frist couple of albums), play the first, and sing the melody from the second or third over it. You'll be amazed at how different they aren't.
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Training it on diverse music would be ideal if they had a lot more training data to work with. Otherwise you'll end up with very incoher
Yes, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
...even if you can get it to create long, coherent chord progressions, it still will have to stick to chords that match whatever was sung. Even if the system knows how to do jazzy chord changes and secondary function chords and such, an amateur singer won't sing a melody that will flow well with that.
The melody and the chord structure fit together very intimately. If someone doesn't "hear" the chords they want in their head, they probably won't sing a melody that will need an interesting chord progression behind it to make it work.
And of course, for any given melody, there are multiple possible progressions (do you want a IV or a I chord here? Or maybe a V7/V?). The singer will need to have the musical sense to choose which one they want.
Parent
Re:Yes, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Based on what it's trained on, the system will show certain tendencies. If after training it's boxed up and given to a user to work with (no further training possibly by user), then the user will have to learn what these tendencies are and adjust accordingly.
And yes, to not create total rubbish the singer will have to have some musical sense. Just like how a "language model" is used to pick out the most-likely-to-be-correct translation from a lattice that the translation model generates in statistical natural language translation systems, the singer might need to pick out what he/she desires out of a set of possibilities the music generation system presents.
So, if your point was that this system will not be able to instantly fulfill an amateur singer's desires, then you're definitely right. Ideally the system would be able to be further trained on music the amateur singer personally enjoys (or wants to emulate), and would also learn from the choices the singer makes when selecting progressions generated by the system. Over time, then, it would do a better job of mapping the singer's vocals to what he/she wants to hear as an accompaniment.
Parent
Re:Yes, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
My personal favorite example here is the popular song "Turkey in the Straw". The traditional harmony goes something like this (assuming the key of C):
verse: C-C-C-C-C-C-G-G-C-C-C-C-C-C-G-C
chorus: C-C-C-C-F-F-F-F-C-C-C-C-C-C-G-C
However, this is a very nice more complex harmony:
verse: C-C-C-C-C-Am-Dm-G-C-G/D-C/E-C/E-F-D/F#-G-C
chorus: C-C-C-C-F-F/E-Dm-G-C-D-D#dim-C/E-F-D/F#-G-C
The melody works either way, but the harmonies are quite different.
Parent
Re:Shouldn't be too hard... (Score:5, Interesting)
Linkin Park songs...You'll be amazed at how different they aren't.
Somebody took two songs, pitch-shifted one (and probably tweaked the timing a bit) and built an MP3 with one song in each speaker. [caltech.edu]
Parent
Re:Shouldn't be too hard... (Score:5, Funny)
Ah-ha! Google found it for me:
http://www.thewebshite.net/nickelback.htm [thewebshite.net]
Parent
And The Most Important Band Of The Last 20 Years (Score:4, Informative)
Watch the beginning/end of Dumb on MTV Unplugged. Kurt outright admits that they can't normally play Dumb and On A Plain back-to-back "because they're exactly the same song" but that TV editing will fix it.
8 million people bought Nevermind (On A Plain)
4 million people bought In Utero (Dumb)
5 million people bought MTV Unplugged (both)
Apparently a good song is still a good song, even if you record it as two separate ones.
Parent
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Sure, it's easy to pick up and make a song with it. Sure, pop, rock, and just about everything else is built around the I-IV-V. That doesn't dilute the power of the I-IV-V. There's a lot to be said for taking a simple canvas and working with it. It comes from the blues and evolved to jazz (in the form of ii-V-I). It's a formula, and one that you can squeeze a lot out of. I could point you to some songs that use a I-IV-V that would blow you away. You
....... and just what we would expect (Score:2)
RIAA should take note (Score:2)
The walls are falling in on an industry that cashed in on people's inability to tell good music for bad.
This is good news for all musicians who make music worth listening to, as opposed to music worth blaring out of a radio in the background while you IM, buy corporate media on Amazon.com, watch TV and send pictures of your weener to "girls" you met on myspace.
Oblig. Simp. (Score:2)
Finally! (Score:2)
Isn't this old hat? (Score:2)
Bonus video! [youtube.com] :)
What a waste (Score:2)
Power for the matrix! (Score:2)
It's a probability computation algorithm that has been trained, through analysis of 300 rock, pop, country and jazz songs, to recognize fragments of melody and chords that work well together, as well as chords that compliment each another.
I'm going to feed the output of MySong directly into the input of MyEar, and get all those annoying humans completely out of the loop.
And then...and then...I'll plug the humans into little VR pods, one per human (they'll never notic
DMC-whA? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Reason #87923642 why your music is suks (Score:2)
The humans seem to only ever think of bad ideas.
gah. (Score:2)
I strongly suspect this will end up like the "watercolour" and "oils" filters on photoshop - as in "interesting, but no substitute for talent".
Expect to see this IP in karaoke and sing along machines to convince gullible people they have talent (and less money).
I have this weird mental image of George Gerswhin arguing with his new electronic piano (yes, I know he's dead) before throwing it out of his window.
Paging Spider Robinson... (Score:5, Funny)
Singing in Tune trick (Score:5, Funny)
While singing, your voice bounces off the hand in front of your mouth and then gets redirected into your ear. Then you can adjust the pitch of your voice to harmonize with that of the recording. This really makes a difference in your ability to sing in tune.
I thought that this was my secret trick until I saw the BeeGees on television long ago and Robin Gibb was using the same 'hand behind ear' technique to get his complex falsetto parts just right. The studio monitor fed his voice towards his ears.
I know, I know, the BeeGees, don't laugh, during the years 1975 to 1979 they were best male ensemble vocalist group in the popular music world. Dorks maybe by current standards, but who are Slashdaughters to judge in that regard?
Anyway, I realize that the last thing a Slashdot reader will ever do is sing. But most Slashdot readers have an obsession with doing things right, should the need ever arise, then in regards to singing, this is how it can be done right.
I suspect that this Microsoft program, like all Microsoft pop culture products, will go nowhere and die a slow, embarrassing death should it ever get released. It sounds to me (bad pun) like the auto-play features found on those plastic WalMart keyboards that are too cheap and dumb to have MIDI ports included on the back. Microsoft should put this code into open-source and take a tax write-off on the development costs.
And speaking of which, just exactly WHY is Microsoft researching automatic computer music product generation? If I recall correctly, don't they make personal computer operating systems and business software. I guess that it must be that since they found and eliminated all the bugs in their primary products that they were looking for a new challenge. And they want to get some of the glory that is coming from the Rock Star plastic button guitar weirdness that is currently popular among the less-musically-inclined sector of the population.
Headline Correction (Score:3, Interesting)
Correct Version: "Researchers Create a BAD Automatic Backup Band for BAD Singers"
OK. That was silly of me. But, I do have to say that if all music in the future was created like this, I'd probably stab myself in the ears. It's early in this game though... I suspect that once the concepts of the software are ironed out, the addition of more interesting chord progressions will happen. I'm still wondering how real musicians would wind up finding any use for this?
I've been using computer based music sequencers since the mid 80s and I think the last thing any real musician wants to see is "Microsoft Composer". I can see it now, instead of Clippy, they'll have "Wolfy" which will be a horrid caricature of Mozart appear every time you start to create a song:
1. You make something using minor 7ths and 9ths and Wolfy shows up, "I see you're writing an 'unhappy' song, would you like to make your song happy"?
2. You start sequencing something very abstract and atonal and this is the way you've worked on music for nearly three decades, up pops Wolfy, "It looks like you're having trouble getting started, would you like me to show you how to do a basic major C chord progression"?
3. You start inputing some heavy polyrhythms, and Wolfy butts in again, "Your song appears to be too rhythmically different, do you need help with a standard 4/4 beat"?
Ugh... more and more reduction to the lowest common denominator. Back in high school a friend and I came to the conclusion that all highly popular music would eventually be one note surrounded by 4/4 beats and grunts for lyrics. This software certainly seems to be taking things in that direction.
I keed I keed.
Oblig. Grammar Correction (Score:3, Informative)
chords and melodies cannot compliment one another, however, they can complement one another, like complementaty colors.
and "each another" is just sloppy.
I've got mod points, so I'm not worried too much about burning karma...thus the latent grammar Nazi comes out.
MS likes Rhythm changes (Score:5, Interesting)
Ballmer song? (Score:3, Funny)