Completely Unnecessary

Earlier this week, I made the mistake of watching Microsoft’s advertisement for their new product, Songsmith.

[Valleywag, which has some Songsmith remixes, urged me not to click the link to the video - I am passing on their warning. The horribleness stuck in my head and I actually sang it in the shower. You have been warned.]

The upshot of the product is that you sing into a microphone, and the program creates a midi monster to ‘match’ your vocal stylings.

Wrongsmith [via Metafilter] is compiling Songsmith remixes of popular songs and organizing them by artist.

I immediately clicked on The Clash (surprise!), and was treated to the most horrible rendition of Should I Stay or Should I Go that could ever possibly exist. Joe Strummer is rolling in his grave.

What’s great about Songsmith, though, is how incredibly it stuffed the song up. (I haven’t had any music theory since I was 14, so I’m just going by ear on this.)

It’s so off that at first I thought it’d gotten the timing of the beats wrong. But, no, it appears that it managed to figure out that Joe mostly comes in on the two beat (or just before).

It works for The Clash because of the sparseness of the music; overloaded with midi chords and beats, it sounds incredibly off.

Second, it’s misjudged the key, resulting in horrible, horrible shifts and key changes as it tries to accommodate both the song and Joe’s tendency to (intentionally?) go flat at the end of phrases.

Actually, possibly the worst part is Songsmith’s inability to recognize the end of verses and choruses. It just elides the whole song together and is awful.

The nadir is after the bridge (at about 2:16). It’s been jamming along on it’s own little midi piano thing, when suddenly the singing starts again. Ear bleeding ensues.

I haven’t listened to any of the others on the site, but I can’t imagine them being worse than this.

Update: Actually, Billy Idol’s White Wedding is pretty wonderful. Wrong, wrong, wrong - but, with the video, sublime.

And Wonderwall is laugh out loud funny, but kind of works in a weird way.

Vaguely Related

• Not That You Asked…
• John Cage’s Musicircus

They can be hard to find.

Truth be told, I don’t go see much live music because I’m a pitch snob. Far too many bands these days are altered in the studio. If you can’t sing, I just kind of hate it. I’ve spent too many shows cringing at flat notes to generally take a risk on someone I don’t know.

I know, there’s this amazing je ne sais quoi to being at a live show that listening to a CD just can’t replace. It’s all so special and I’m so glad we were all there to share it together.

Great. Learn to sing.

That being said, I just came back from one of the best shows I’ve ever been to: Dan Deacon. Not only was his music great, he put us hipsters through our paces. I love nothing more than seeing a group of los too cool for school being made to do funny things.

He made the entire audience move to one side and then perform a huge ‘tunnel’ - you know where two people put their hands up, and then the next pair goes through and joins the end of the line? He also made a number of individuals dance ’sassy’ in the middle of a huge ring of us.

In fact, this performance was second only to Les Savy Fav at Intonation ‘05, when Tim Harrington made 10,000-20,000 hipsters in ironic sunglasses sit down in unison. It was like magic.

Anyway, I am sleepy, but Dan’s show is definitely worth checking out (and now I’m about to cross-post). He’s performing tomorrow at the St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival (good luck getting tickets -boo, I wanted to see Gotye) and also on Tuesday somewhere that I’m not telling. And it’s only maybe because I don’t remember.

Vaguely Related

• John Cage’s Musicircus
• Alignment

But my vote for creepiest piece of music ever is still the third movement of Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. I think they might have used it in The Shining, and if they didn’t, they should have.

I’ve heard it maybe 200 times, but - let me tell you - at 1:20 in the morning, the bit starting around the 2:00 mark is enough to make a girl look around her lounge room and wish her roommates were still up.

Well, back to writing about 9/11! It’s all fun and games here at the Blue House.

Vaguely Related

• Printers as Metaphor
• Never Let Me Be Called a Pessimist

I’m not supposed to double post from my the Melbourne Metblog, but I’m too excited - loosely-based internet rules be damned!

John Cage is one of my favorite 20th century composers. His most famous piece is ‘4:33′, in which no actual notes are played. That’s interesting and all, but I’m in love with his prepared piano stuff. His technique included shoving (very carefully) a bunch of stuff (frequently everyday, junk objects) into pianos and composing around that. Some of it’s really amazing.

Well, I’ve just spent 15 minutes failing to make the audio player work, so that’s thrilling. I’m sure I’ll think about this time when I’m whining over my 12,000 words due in about three weeks. Here’s a youtube clip instead (there’s a bunch of lead up, so I’d start watching from 5:00, the piece starts just before 6:00):

Here’s another. This is actually from the Prepared Piano set I wanted to play, though not the one I wanted. It’s pretty neat:

Anyway, this Friday the Melbourne Arts Festival is running John Cage’s Musicircus. It goes from dusk (5:48pm) to dawn the next morning. There’s all sorts of music, art, dance, theatre, etc. The lineup looks amazing, though there are literally so many acts I didn’t even get to look at them all properly.

So excited for this. It’s going to be 25 degrees as well, but, being Melbourne, the low is going to be 9. Sigh.

Vaguely Related

• Good Shows
• De-Fabulousing