Sing your songs with Songsmith

It is said that A R Rahman, the Mozart of Madras, composes his tunes for film songs first & then the song-writers fill in the words. He is also said to have a bank of tunes that he mixes and matches to create award-winning songs.

Everyone likes to sing (some at least secretly). Although only a talented few can have the chance of singing for the likes of Rahman, you need not any longer keep your song inside. Songsmith (a 98MB download) is a fun application developed by Microsoft Research that provides adaptive musical accompaniment as you croon. You can save the songs you record in MP3 or WMA format. The tool may not help you win you awards but it may well bring out the singer in you.

SeattlePi nicely describes how it works:

Start up Songsmith, pick a style and a tempo, click record and sing a melody to the beat.

Songsmith tracks the pitch of your voice.

An algorithm, trained by analyzing the chords in a database of 300 songs, takes the pitches and figures out what chords match.

Songsmith then plays back the melody, along with the accompaniment it creates.

Then users can get creative.

Move a slider to one side and the accompaniment is "sad." Move it the other way and it's "happy." Another slider can adjust the "jazziness" of the accompaniment.

The UI is pretty intuitive and the software can be used by both amateurs and professionals. This is also a good tool for absolute newbies interested in Western music genres. You can try the software for 6 hours and then choose to buy.

Also see: Giveaways