Microsoft Songsmith was a program released in January 2009 that was intended to create musical backing to any song you sang into it. It worked horribly, and was promoted by a ridiculous commercial that went viral.
I subverted the program with a project called Classic Hits By Microsoft Songsmith, in which I fed the isolated vocal tracks of famous songs into the program, had it randomly choose genres, then matched the output back to the original video. The project drew attention from the New York Times, the London Guardian and NPR. The videos have long been swept from YouTube, but here I will present the original videos I created for posterity’s sake.
Classic Hits By Microsoft Songsmith: “We Got The Beat” by Go-Go’s (originally created 3 February 2009)