songsmith

Oh hey, it's Matt.

My first post here, and it's not about biking, crafting or sewing, and although I do rather enjoy it I wouldn't say I "love" it.

If you haven't heard about Microsoft's new "Songsmith" (which you probably have), it's a program that automatically writes accompaniments to simple musical phrases, vocal tracks, or whatever you stick into it (garbage in, garbage out of course). See the official trailer... here.

So then a bunch of people started stripping down famous songs to just their vocal tracks and feeding them into songsmith, with hilarious results. A few highlights (to my hears):
Billy Idol - White Wedding
The Beastie Boys - Intergalactic
Weezer - Buddy Holly

Well, you probably know about that too, huh? Well then check this out; some guy in Germany put together a bunch of graphs of various statistics related to the current worldwide recession, then converted them into diatonic ("within a key") MIDI melodies, then fed them into microsoft songsmith.

The result? A Soundtrack for the Recession!