SongSmith is a Microsoft research project designed to narrow down, as much as possible, the gap between writing songs and writing music. Developed by Dan Morris and Sumit Basu, primary researchers at Microsoft Research, SongSmith is now available both as a trial version for free and for purchase through the Microsoft Store, for just $29.95. The solution is capable of building the complete musical accompaniment around a song “performed” for SongSmith, based only on the voice of the users. According to Microsoft, the project is aimed at musical novices and aspiring songwriters, as professionals will undoubtedly already posses the skills that SongSmith is designed to compensate for.

“Sumit and I are hobbyist musicians, and although neither of us is going to write the next hit single, we both have fun working on new songs,” Morris explained. “We saw an opportunity to use our backgrounds in computer science to give everyone a first taste of songwriting and to let everyone have fun making original music.”

Introduced at the 2009 International Consumers Electronics Show (CES 2009) in Las Vegas, SongSmith enables users to select from no less than 30 styles of music. Based on the singer’s voice, SongSmith will analyze the raw melody being sung, and will create music via signal processing and artificial intelligence techniques.

SongSmith integrates exclusively with Windows-based PCs, and the company informed that it supported Windows XP SP2 or SP3, Windows Vista RTM and SP1. Users will need machines with at least 1 GB of RAM and a CPU of at least 1GHz. The solution will also require them to download and install .NET Framework 3.0.

“The free trial will work for six hours of actual application use. That’s not six hours from the instant you download it, it’s six hours of you really using Songsmith. If you close Songsmith, minimize Songsmith, or start working in another application, the clock stops. So, this is plenty of time to make lots of songs (making songs is quick and easy, we promise!). And the trial version is fully-functional, so you can create songs, send them to your friends, post them online, etc.,” an excerpt of SongSmith's description reads.

Microsoft Research SongSmith is available for download here.