I’m singing to my laptop…..
As a kind of post script to my last post, I have been playing more with Microsoft Songsmith and a colleague also sent me links to various classic songs “reinterpreted” by Songsmith from You Tube. During the last week, I have been in two minds about this software, on the one hand the fact that technology that makes a process like music production easier will undoubtedly encourage more people to have a go, and in turn this may lead to more people having the opportunity to create music. On the other hand, as Mark Wherry reasoned in Sound on Sound in January 2009 “if you subscribe to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s view that a person will have their most useful creative moments when faced with a situation that offers a level of challenge equal to their skills, it’s impossible for an easy process to yield meaningful results.” However, in the same article he also argues that it is actually a wonderful thing to give everyone the opportunity to create music. Whilst more of it may be mediocre, according to the infinite monkey theorem it might also result in a masterpiece that would not otherwise have been written.
I have yet to be convinced that Microsoft Songsmith allows the possibility to create a masterpiece (none of my efforts so far are even worthy of public consumption!), but I do urge you to give it a try (it’s free to try click here to go to download page) and maybe you can create the masterpiece that has so far eluded me! The future of music creation – I hope not, but maybe it will help a few people find their way into music that would not have otherwise have done so. And I guess if it helps spark a flash of creativity in some people then so much the better.
