Microsoft Research has done some amazing work; it doesn’t always move me to tears, but there’s some fantastic stuff that deserves real recognition. And MySong is … well, technologically impressive, if musically painful. It’s a sort of collision between AutoTune and Band-in-a-Box: it recognizes a melody as input, then harmonizes that melody.

The vocal input goes well, and illustrates the number of different inputs beyond the mouse you can expect in The Future. Here’s the problem: harmony is extraordinarily difficult to model on a computer because of the number of variables, the amount that’s driven by instinct and art. And let’s be blunt: it doesn’t work right.

In short: if you’re planning to build a Jerome Kern robot, the technology may not be there just yet.

Musician, composer, and musique concrete artist Henri Chopin has died, writes Seth:

he has been and remains a figure whose sound work is very important to me, so i thought i’d share it with you all.

he was a sound poet who used reel-to-reel tape as his paper, performance instrument, and collaborator.

Chopin is lesser-known than some artists even in the concrete world, so if you don’t know his work, there’s no time like the present to discover it — quite a lot is available online.

Videos and comments at WFMU Beware of the Blog

Lots and Lots of Sound Files at UbuWeb

His work spanned more than just experiments with audio tape, as a graphic and visual artist and even a typographer. His poems took striking shape as visual art, like the dagger formed with a typewriter, at right (via the dbqp blog, below). As a magazine publisher, he brought together works by characters from William S. Burroughs to the Fluxus gang. I have to admit, much as I love some of the power of the blog world, I don’t think we have anything approaching the insane avant-garde magazines of the 20th Century. (But, then, maybe we’re just waiting for the 21st Century’s Erik Satie. Or maybe we need to spend more time learning from the likes of Chopin — Henri Chopin, that is.)

So far, I see these obituaries; please feel free as always to add other comments, memories, reflections, or links. Via Harriet, we learn that Chopin died peacefully at home with his family in England at age 85:

Henri Chopin (1922-2008) [obituary by Kenneth Goldsmith, Harriet blog (Poetry Foundation)]

Tribute to Henri Chopin [Soul Sphincter]

When Sound Ends, Vision Endures [words, images, and more following his death, from dbqp: visualizing poetics]

And you think you can do strange things on a mic? Watch this:

Stompboxes are back! Yes, software is great, but the gigging musician still loves something you can plug in and step on. The Messe show saw some traditionally rack-mounted gear reborn in stomp form.

Sure to be a huge hit, Roland’s BOSS RE-20 takes the beloved RE-201 Roland Space Echo and recreates it as a stompbox. It emulates all the major features of the RE-201, down to placement presets and tape flutter and magnetic head sound saturation, and adds a longer delay time — plus the ability to tap in delays with your foot. No pricing or availability yet that I’ve seen.

BOSS RE-20 Space Echo Product Page
Music thing weighs in with some thoughts.

At the other end of the spectrum, vocal processor maker TC-Helicon is best known for making big, do-everything racks. They’ve now taken the most popular features there, and repackaged as stomp boxes called VOICE|TONE. The idea is to perform all of the sweetening you’d normally apply in the studio onstage.

Music lovers, online tools are getting more useful. They can even recognize that song you can’t remember (boy, there are there some evenings of my life I’d like back), and keep you from missing your favorite artists’ gigs in your home town.

Midomi lets you search for artists and songs the old-fashioned way, via text search. But it also lets you perform “voice search” by singing with a microphone. Here’s the extra hook for vocalists: you can put your own performances in here and get rated on your talent. It’s like Google meets American Idol meets artificial intelligence:

Midomi, via Music Gadgets.net

Next up, how often have you heard your favorite, legendary artist played blocks away from you — the week after it happened? There are various online solutions to this problem, but iConcertCal is unique in that it does the work of entering your favorite artists for you, by searching your iTunes library. Now, of course, this could lead to some embarrassing moments, so if you haven’t already cleared that guilty pleasure tune you ripped when you first installed iTunes, now’s the time:

iConcertCal, via the XO Wave Blog

iConcertCal works for both Windows and Mac versions of iTunes. Nice, but anyone know if there’s something like this for MediaMonkey?

Pandora lovers: Tomorrow, I’m having coffee with the founder of Pandora, the nifty music auto-discovery tool. Got any questions you’d like me to ask him? Let me know in comments before tomorrow morning (Wednesday) New York time.

Multi-instrumentalists, Line6 must have you in mind. The equipment maker, known primarily for their guitar products, has plunked a keyboard on their multi-effects box / audio interface hybrid, TonePort. There are plenty of reasons to like the TonePort line: a broad approach to effects that caters to vocalists as well as guitarists, and cheaply-priced but good-sounding effects, in an interface with excellent low-latency performance. (Not to mention retro-looking VU meters, and they’re not just eye candy — they’re assignable.) Not everyone will need a keyboard in the same unit, but if you do, it’s nice to see a real mod wheel, an always-on octave LED (as opposed to most keyboards, which require us to guess which octave we left them in), and handy knobs, transport controls, and foot pedal integration. Deep software integration and a dedicated headphone port could make these a nice addition to a laptop rig.

Line6 TonePort KB37

My own personal preference would be for a standalone unit to go with another keyboard, but I know some friends I’m sure will want one of these. The only major question mark is how good Line6’s keyboard quality is; stay tuned for that and pricing.

Updated: Music thing’s readers have something interesting to note on the keyboard issue: Marcus Ryle, a vet of Oberheim who worked on the classic Xpander and Matrix 12 synths as well as a keyboardist on “We are the World” works on product development. So, did Line6’s keyboard love finally rub off on a product? That sounds good to me. I hope Line6 doesn’t stop there, though. What I love about the KB37 is that, at the very least, it’s a new concept that challenges some assumptions about different markets. A quick stroll through any NAMM show will show you this is a very conservative industry, with pretty rigid ideas of who its customers are, and usually that includes accepted dogma like “guitarists won’t touch a keyboard.” They have a lot of business experience making those markets work, of course, but I’ll bet if you’re reading this, you and the people you know don’t always fit into those categories.

I’d love to see more out-of-the-box thinking about gear that’s fun to play with a computer, blending software and hardware. So, please, Line6 and everyone else, bring it on. (And meanwhile, if I can’t master the guitar, maybe I should take this product as a sign that I should at least practice my singing.)