The Death of your Soul: Microsoft Songsmith

Now THIS is what I'm talking about when I try to explain the difference between using a tool and creating something.

Songsmith generates musical accompaniment to match a singer’s voice. Just choose a musical style, sing into your PC’s microphone, and Songsmith will create backing music for you. Then share your songs with your friends and family, post your songs online, or create your own music videos.

Create really, really, crappy background music for you.

You may have a song in your head, something beautiful and wonderful to share, and this monstrosity will make it sound like show tunes on the Love Boat. Rather than creating something new, this thing destroys your creativity and replaces it with soulless pap.

This is the same problem with desktop publishing, the camcorder, Photoshop, and Dreamweaver. The tools give you the appearance of having a talent, but it doesn't actually give you that talent.

Socrates said about writing (because he apparently didn't write), 'To your students you give an appearance of wisdom, not the reality of it.' Now, I'm not saying that the written word is bad, but we've had literally (pun intended) thousands of years to learn how to use the tool.

It's creative when you're the first one to use a tool a new way. Some of the early Internet phenomena were total crap, like the dancing hamster site. People went to these things in droves because no one had done it before, but the talent it took to create a few animated gifs and speed up a wave file was simple. Then the thousands of knock-offs made the Internet a terrible place.

I feel that it's our destiny in life to raise the bar, to constantly find new things, and deeper understanding of old things. Finding a simpler way to do something like adding chord progressions to a vocal track is great, but when you put it into a package like Songsmith, you create a superficial distraction.

Nothing new will come from Songsmith users, and they will be so self impressed, and so distracted by their little creations that they will never evolve, they will never learn new things about themselves or learn how to create real music. And, most likely, they will never learn what real music is.

Turn off the chord generator, and just sing.