Songsmith

Songsmith was marketed as a creativity tool: sing into the microphone, pick a style, and the program would guess chords to accompany the melody3. The joke is that the chord-detection almost never guessed right, so professionally recorded vocals got stapled to oompah polka, mariachi, country shuffle, or bossa nova in ways no human arranger would allow2. A typical Songsmith video opens with a familiar isolated vocal, a slight silence, and then a wheezy MIDI backing drops in with the wrong tempo, wrong key, and a chord change every two beats.

The pleasure of the format is specifically the mismatch. Vocalists like Freddie Mercury, James Hetfield, and Roy Orbison were run through Songsmith on YouTube, and the audio engine would decide a thrash riff was actually a jaunty waltz4. The visual half was often a static album cover or a slideshow of the artist, which only highlighted the audio sacrilege. Urban Dictionary entries from the period defined the word as a verb meaning to inflict terrible synthetic music on a friend5.