Songsmith from Microsoft (video)

I’m going to retroactively take back every bad thing I ever said about Microsoft, if only because of their new piece of software: Songsmith.

Not because of the program itself, which generates a tune after the user sings into a microphone. It’s because of the video they created to promote Songsmith, which will melt your brain with hilarity. In it, a young girl demonstrates just how easy it is to create a song using Microsoft Songsmith…so easy, in fact, that it appears she’s using a Powerbook to do so (MS should really have a clause in their ad contracts that the creatives can’t use Macs in their commercials). This amazes her father so much that he promptly steals her laptop so he can run to a coffee shop and entertain/annoy the people there with his magnum opus about glow-in-the-dark towels.

This, of course, really amazes a songwriter who’s band is complaining that his songs are “a little stale lately.” He also has the best line in the entire short: “Microsoft, huh? So it’s pretty easy to use?”

And it all ends happily with the dad knocking ‘em dead at a business meeting with his second song about towels, where he is greeted with applause, rather than the dead-eyed horror you might expect. It’s all part of the magic of Microsoft!

If you have been as amazed by this video as I was, feel free to download a demo version from Microsoft Research where you’ll get six hours of creativity for free (full version is $29/€29). If you use it to create a song about how awesome the Macintosh is, send it on to us and we’ll see if we can get you onstage at the next Apple event, because my guess is that John Mayer uses the same songwriting process.

Product [Songsmith]