The even more interesting sub-genre of synthetic backing tracks
2009-01-31 by Hal BerstramRick Astley- Never Gonna Give You Up (Microsoft Songsmith metal mix)
The laughably titled “Microsoft Research” (what, you mean the company that took 11 years to launch a rip-off of Apple’s 1984 Macintosh operating system actually has a research department?) recently released Songsmith – a program that generates synthetic backing tracks from a vocal track that you feed into it.
The idea is that you take a mic and sing into the computer, having set the bpm and a music style (e.g. techno, indie, big-band) and a ‘feel’ (laid back, lively, etc.) and then the program works out an ‘appropriate’ musical backing track for your warbles.
Sort of karaoke in reverse… a limited novelty idea at best, until some bright spark came up with the idea of running the vocal tracks from well-known pop hits into the software to ‘remix’ them.
Already several dozen of these efforts are up on Youtube: I’m a particular fan of Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’ done as a Billy Joelesque piano ballad, and the Doobie Brothers’ ‘Long Train Running’ done as a 70s funk extravaganza.
For this submission, however, rather than poppified rock, I’ve chosen rockified of pop. In this case Lancashire’s er… “finest” export Rick Astley, who made a splash in 1987 with the Stock-Aitken-Waterman written-and-produced ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’.
Those of you under about 25 are lucky in that you can’t remember just how shite the late 1980s were in pop terms. PWL (Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s record label) were the biggest sellers of the period. It was Thatcherism put to music: disposable, production line candyfloss for the masses, while the moneymen counted the readies and gave a little back to Maggie Thatcher so she could bash any dissenters over the head. It were less subtle back then, my friends.
This is my favourite Songsmith remix so far because it beats PWL at their own game – not only is this completely manufactured, there’s no-one even writing the tune – just some computer algorithm. A serendipitous, John Cagesque by-product of this process is that Rick Astley is revealed to be the greatest AOR vocalist we never had. REO Speedwagon eat your heart out… ‘Metal’ as a description of this may be stretching the trade descriptions act, but hey, that’s what they called Def Leppard, too.
Download MP3 (0:00min / 0MB)
- Microsoft Songsmith
- available as a free trial download
- The Youtube video version
- azz100c's Youtube page
- The genius who produced this - several other versions and tracks by other artists available
Comments 
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Hal – this is absolute genius. The sub-genre probably deserves a whole blog to itself (and probably already has one I suspect!)
The amazing thing is that the Songsmith version is just as catchy as the original – I've been humming that chord progression to myself all afternoon after just a couple of listens! I also find it strangely reminiscent of Ranbow's classic Since You've Been Gone for some reason.
Yep – I think the guy on Youtube who's doing these is a genius. We've found a couple more that work really well: Enimem's 'Ass Like That' done in a Bluegrass style and Metallica's 'Enter Sandman' done as Depeche Mode-style heavy vintage synth pop. Both improvements on the original.