Microsoft recently released Songsmith, software that takes a vocal performance and generates a musical score.

The original intention, as I understand it, was to give singers (or people who fancied themselves as such) an easy way to put some music around their songs. Ah, but the law of unintended consequences had other ideas.

What Microsoft has done is opened a rift between our universe and some sort of parallel universe where all the songs we know were actually a collaboration between a songwriter and a bunch of mediocre musicians with Casio synths. A part of me is afraid that this rift will eventually annihilate our own universe. The only way to stop the onslaught is by embracing a new, un-Songsmithable aesthetic.

But I don’t know if I want it to end. I’m really enjoying going to YouTube every day and finding new songs. And as someone with at least a passing interest in the intersection of computers and the arts, I’m at least sort of impressed with what Microsoft has done technologically.

As a final thought, I hypothesize that there is some sort of identity relationship between MIA and Songsmith, whereby feeding Songsmith an MIA song will actually produce the same song.

Or maybe, just maybe, the awesomeness is amplified into this: