Comment by zyklonix

Microsoft Songsmith is another one that deserved a second life. It let you hum or sing a melody and would auto-generate full backing tracks, guitar, bass, drums, chords, in any style you chose.

It looked a bit goofy in the promo videos, but under the hood it was doing real-time chord detection and accompaniment generation. Basically a prototype of what AI music tools like Suno, Udio, or Mubert are doing today, fifteen years too early.

If Microsoft had kept iterating on it with modern ML models, it could’ve become the "GarageBand for ideas that start as a hum."