Today's music production generally combines MIDI information (data instructions to synthesizers, software instruments or drum machines) with digital audio recordings of real instruments or voices. MIDI is highly editable; you can get in there, tweak each note, move it backwards or forwards, correct timings, make sounds louder or quieter and change their pitch.

Audio is a lot less flexible; while the advent of digital audio has let us move chunks of audio around within a song and change their speed and pitch, you can't actually reach inside the sound file and tweak individual characteristics. So, if you have a recording of a guitar and a voice together, and the guitar playing is perfect but the voice is out of tune, well, you have to junk the whole take.

But Melodyne changes everything. A technique that's been named Direct Note Access gives you the ability to adjust individual elements of an audio recording in a way that would have seemed unthinkable even a year ago.

Take a look at it in action; while purists might claim that Melodyne could easily strip the spontaneity and life out of music (in the same way that AutoTune software has rendered every half-arsed pop singer pitch-perfect), this video shows that it's flexible enough to become an incredibly useful compositional tool:

The same cannot be said, however, for MySong, a Microsoft project which generates an automated backing to a melody. You sing your tune into the computer, press the button, and Microsoft turns it into a magnum opus for you. As its creator, Dan Morris, explained to New Scientist: "It feeds... the notes to the system's chord probability computation algorithm. This algorithm has been trained, through analysis of 300 rock, pop, country and jazz songs, to recognize fragments of melody and chords that work well together, as well as chords that complement each another." 

In short, it's guaranteed to deliver music of the lowest common denominator, accompaniments based on an average of 300 other songs. While this could conceivably provide mild amusement for someone with no musical flair on a rainy Sunday afternoon, it doesn't do the world of music any favours.

Check out the video demonstration below for the perfect illustration of this; the program takes a few short seconds to reduce a tune as breathtakingly beautiful as Jerome Kern's "The Way You Look Tonight" to a four-chord monstrosity.

If writing music is about anything, it should be experimentation and exploration, trial and error. MySong is nothing more than join the dots, or colour by numbers – which is fine, of course, but don't imagine for a second that it's teaching anyone anything whatsoever about how music actually works.

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