Value in Sound

Believe it or not, this isn’t going to be a post about Nickelback though I can’t imagine their music doing any better on a creative scale. Microsoft is introducing a new program called “Songsmith” which allows you to sing along to a drummer, and then builds music around it based on big smiley icons and other childish graphical representations that overly simplify essentially the entirety of music. You can read about their terrible ad campaign and even watch their more terrible commercial here.

Look, enough is enough. It’s one thing for actual musicians to be given simple technology (like Garage Band) to be able to record themselves being at least somewhat musical, but reducing the creative process to something as trivial as randomly warbling into a microphone and then having a computer generate everything else…well, I guess it’d be good if you’re between the ages of 3 and 6, other than that? It’s like being able to get 3-stars on Rock Band on the medium setting and calling yourself a musician.

Thanks Microsoft, I can’t wait to hear all the “music” you’ve enabled moronic high-schoolers to create – hope you like songs about farts!