# Songsmith Microsoft Research released Songsmith on January 8, 2009, a program that generated backing music under a sung melody, but a cheerful promo video filmed partly on a sticker-covered MacBook Pro set the internet off[1]. YouTube users then isolated the vocal tracks of famous songs, fed them into Songsmith, and uploaded the mangled results. The remix format defined the meme throughout 2009[3]. ## Origin Microsoft Research released Songsmith as a public download on January 8, 2009, alongside a three-minute promo called Everyone Has A Song Inside[1]. The ad starred Microsoft engineer Dan Morris as a glow-in-the-dark towel marketer who discovers the program on his daughter's laptop, and engineer Sumit Basu as a leather-jacketed rock star who records a track in a coffee shop[3]. Viewers quickly noticed the daughter's computer in the opening scene was a MacBook Pro with stickers covering the Apple logo, which the YouTube comments turned into the first running gag[1]. The viral turn came when the free trial version let anyone test the software at home. Rather than record their own singing, users ripped the acapella stems from well-known tracks and let Songsmith auto-score the result. The earliest widely circulated remixes targeted stadium rock vocals, where the contrast with Songsmith's cheerful presets was loudest[2]. - **Platform:** Microsoft Research / YouTube (viral spread) - **Creator:** Unknown - **Date:** 2009 ## Overview Songsmith was marketed as a creativity tool: sing into the microphone, pick a style, and the program would guess chords to accompany the melody[3]. 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 allow[2]. 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 waltz[4]. 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 friend[5]. ## How It Spread Within weeks of release, YouTube filled with Songsmith versions of recognizable hits. An Ozzy Osbourne era Black Sabbath vocal became a lounge number, and Oasis vocals were given cocktail-piano treatment, each clip racking views in the hundreds of thousands[2][4]. Metallica, Queen, and Roy Orbison acapellas were among the most uploaded source tracks, and remix channels adopted a plain naming convention of "Song X in Songsmith"[6][7]. Coverage from tech blogs amplified the trend by linking directly to the funniest uploads, and Microsoft's own promo video was reposted and dissected for the MacBook detail[1]. The remix wave peaked in the first half of 2009 and settled into archival status as the free trial window closed and attention moved on, but the uploads stayed on YouTube and are still watchable[3]. Songsmith is now cited as an early example of software whose unintended output outlived its intended use. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Songsmith? Songsmith is a 2009 Microsoft Research program that generates backing music under a sung melody, best known for the viral YouTube remixes made by feeding famous vocal tracks into it[3]. ### Where did Songsmith come from? Microsoft released it on January 8, 2009, with a promo video titled Everyone Has A Song Inside starring Microsoft engineers Dan Morris and Sumit Basu[1]. ### What does Songsmith mean? Urban Dictionary entries from 2009 defined songsmith as a verb for inflicting bad synthetic music on someone, taken from the program's output quality[5]. ### How do you use Songsmith? The meme format is to take an isolated vocal from a well-known song, run it through Songsmith's auto-accompaniment, and upload the mismatched result to YouTube[2]. ### Is Songsmith still popular? The remix wave peaked in 2009 and the videos are now a classic archive on YouTube rather than active uploads, but the clips are still watched[4]. ## References 1. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oGFogwcx-E]() 2. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iCJHTzH5DY]() 3. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/songsmith]() 4. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSgPbQeXsk0]() 5. [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Songsmith]() 6. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV2g3MSDKtA]() 7. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci1K9Zcwvy4]() 8. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwsHVF0unK4]() 9. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBajcshfTTM]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/songsmith Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library