[Dixielandjazz] Everybody Wants to get into the act - J Durante

[Stephen G Barbone]

Ok, all you budding songwriters. Here's the pathway to instant musical  
accompaniment, courtesy of Microsoft. No musical training required.  
Look out musos and band leaders, we are being slowly but surely  
replaced by techno geeks. (Tongue in cheek)
Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

NY TIMES - January 25, 2009 - by Randall Stross
Microsoft Songsmith Is Easy (if Painful to Hear)
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.

How satisfying are the musical results? Microsoft lets you hear for  
yourself in a promotional video titled “Everyone Has a Song Inside.”  
The video is getting more attention than the software because it’s  
awful, in unintentional ways. “Notes on ‘Camp’, ” the 1964 essay by  
Susan Sontag, identifies a category of art that isn’t campy, just “bad  
to the point of being laughable, but not bad to the point of being  
enjoyable.” The Songsmith video is exactly that.

Regardless of whether Songsmith sells well, the software will not have  
a material effect on Microsoft’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. “Nothing Can Prepare You for the Microsoft  
Songsmith Commercial” warns Videogum. “Microsoft Songsmith: So  
Wonderfully Bad It Hurts” enthuses The Click Heard Round the World.  
“Worst Microsoft Video Promo Ever” 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 — singing — 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, “the cool new thing.” Dad then absconds with her laptop and  
introduces Songsmith to another adult, who speaks the words you will  
not want to miss: “Microsoft, huh? So it’s pretty easy to use?”

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 — Songsmith supplied the rest  
of the music — and the production company wrote the dialogue, Mr.  
Morris said.

The pair had no intentions of producing satire. “We just wanted to  
make a fun video,” 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  
theEuropean Union. Mr. Morris said the revenue would help to recoup  
development costs.

If it had remained as it was — a research project called MySong that  
was the subject of academic papers — it would not have drawn derision.  
But once it was placed on sale in Microsoft’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:  
“David Lee Roth + Microsoft Songsmith = Pure Horror.”

When TechCrunch’s gadget blog first reported on the Songsmith video —  
“Microsoft Relinquishes ‘Worst Promo Video Ever’ Award to Another  
Department Within Microsoft” — 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, “Rockin’ Our  
Sales,” an homage to the “Born in the U.S.A.” 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 (“Quota is where your focus is; got-ta get those  
bonuses”). It is so self-conscious in its ridiculousness that it’s  
impervious to external scorn.

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

I can’t offer the same apologia for Songsmith’s output when it  
transmutes the rock canon into synthetic treacle. The most  
excruciating Songsmith output I’ve run across on YouTube is a result  
of feeding the software vocals of the Beatles song “Sgt. Pepper’s  
Lonely Hearts Club Band.” 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 at nytimes.com.