« Motorola E6 | Home | Theme DIY for Nokia »
Microsoft creates ‘instant backing band’ for singers
By ASAD | April 7, 2008
Whether you’re a frustrated songwriter or a shower-time crooner, you may long to hear your lyrics put to music. New software from Microsoft promises to provide just that – instant musical accompaniment to singing.
The software, called MySong, was developed by Dan Morris and Sumit Basu at Microsoft’s research lab in Redmond, Washington, US, and Ian Simon at the University of Washington in Seattle.
"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 according to appropriate chords to accompany it." (Watch a video of the process here.)
Their software does two things: it generates a file containing the sequence of sung notes – a process known as "pitch tracking" – then uses that sequence to work out a suitable musical backdrop – a technique called "chord probability computation".
Hear an example of vocal input, MySong’s automatically generated chords and a full musical arrangement.
Read more
Topics: latest news |