The “best” of Songsmith

Recently Microsoft Research released an app called Songsmith that when you sing into it automatically generates music for your lyrics.  It sounds kind of cool, right?  Well, it’s not.  You don’t even need the application to figure that out, the craptastic ad gives you a pretty good idea behind the “genius” of this app:

Alright, beyond the horrid acting and singing (can it really be called singing when it sucks so bad?) there are some things about this ad that are just stupid.  First, Nameless Marketing Dude is making an audio jingle outside?  Come one, do you have any idea how bad the ambient noise would be doing something like that?  Also, if your daughter has flower stickers plastered all over her laptop because she doesn’t want people knowing she’s using an Apple that’s fine.  However, one should NEVER use it as their primary laptop out in public:

The ad ends with the Nameless Marketing Dude singing with his wife wherein she makes some comment about them always talking in rhyme thanks to Songsmith.  Um, yeah, about that…here’s the “song” the video opened with:

“I’m singing with my laptop
making up new songs
What are you doing, Lisa
I’ve never heard you sing”

I challenge anyone to find a rhyme in those lyrics.  Anyway, maybe this was all a big ruse; the video and everything meant to be crappy to get exposure which it has done quite successfully.  That’s too deliberate, however, and I prefer to think this whole campaign was one massive epic fail.

Well, there is one upshot to all this.  The industrious folk of the internet started playing real songs into Songsmith to see what horrible music would come out.  TechCrunch posted a great round-up of these audio disasters but the results are simply hilarious.