Microsoft Research Songsmith is a musical accompaniment application for Microsoft Windows, launched in early 2009. Songsmith immediately generates a musical accompaniment after a voice is recorded. The user can adjust tempo, genre (such as pop, R&B, hip-hop, rock, jazz, or reggae), and overall mood (e.g. to make it happy, sad, jazzy, etc.).[1]
The software was developed by a team at Microsoft Research, led by researchers Dan Morris and Sumit Basu.[2][3][4] The product began as a research project called MySong, conducted at Microsoft Research in collaboration with a University of Washington student, Ian Simon, in the summer of 2007. Songsmith is the second commercial project from Microsoft's Microsoft Research, after AutoCollage.[5]
^"7 Ad Campaigns That Prove Microsoft Was Never Good at This". 2010-09-04. Retrieved 2012-05-22. Once it was out in the wild, it was ripped to shreds by merciless YouTube video-makers showing exactly how badly the software worked with well-known songs, like Queen's 'We Will Rock You'.