MySong is a system that automatically chooses chords to accompany a vocal melody. A user with no musical experience can create a song with instrumental accompaniment just by singing into a microphone, and can experiment with different styles and chord patterns using interactions designed to be intuitive to non-musicians. Our goal is to let people with no training in chords or harmonization get a taste of songwriting.

In this talk, I’ll describe how MySong works, I’ll discuss results from a recent usability study, and I’ll show lots of audio examples to demonstrate that non-musicians are in fact able to use this system as a powerful creative tool.