The geek in question: Sumit Basu

The job title: Researcher, Microsoft Research Knowledge Tools Group

What are you working on right now?
I'm working on a couple different projects, but the big one right now is Songsmith, an application that creates musical accompaniment to go with whatever melody you sing.

Wait, so I could write a song right now?
Totally. Just sing into the computer's microphone, and Songsmith will crank out the chords to go with your song.

...Uh, ok. I guess I could sing something about my dog? [Here's the song I sang into Songsmith, complete with its instantly produced chords. If you listen closely, you can hear cutlery clinking in the background from the café where Sumit and I were talking.]

...OH MY GOD IT'S LIKE MAGIC! How did this happen?
When my colleague Dan Morris started at MSR a couple of years ago, he sent out an e-mail saying he was interested in working on musical stuff, and so we decided to collaborate. We're both musicians, and we were like, "okay, look, a lot of Western music is just chords plus melody." Our scientific question was, given the melody, how accurately can we predict what the chords should be?

So, along with our UW intern, Ian Simon, we started messing around with that … which became the MySong research project. As soon as we got the first version out, it was just super fun to play with. We decided to write a paper and do several tests – asking musicians to compare MySong’s chord choices to musicians’ chord choices for the same melodies, and finding MySong's chords were pretty on par!

Then we did another test where we asked karaoke fans who knew nothing about writing music to trying singing and to see what chords our algorithm would produce. The thing that was really surprising and awesome about that study was the level of sheer delight that those people had. Singers were just like, "I've always been able to sing, I've never been able to make music. Now I can just sit down by myself, like I can sing into this thing, and move a few sliders, and I have an accompaniment!"

So my moment of sheer delight wasn't what you originally intended?
Our initial intellectual interest was focused on this scientific problem of connecting chords to music. Then the next stage of it was interactive learning aspect – allowing people to play with the chord output. Those things both made me all happy in my research head.

But after our trials, we realized we had something that could actually make a lot of people really happy -- and that was kind of exciting in a different way. That's when we started thinking about making MySong into a product, which became Songsmith. Normally with MSR, we try to figure out how our ideas can fit into existing Microsoft products, but when we didn't find and match with any product groups, we started working with the MSR Advanced Development Team to develop Songsmith into downloadable application. We really want people to be able to play with it!

…So all of a sudden you're a product guy?
I'm not sure if I'd go that far – we had a lot of help from the Advanced Development Team. But I never thought that I'd be making music creation products at Microsoft. Coming here, I expected to make my impact through research. At its core, Songsmith is a research algorithm … but, it's also a music product, which kind of blows my mind.

What other surprises have you had working at MSR? The level of potential and creativity that's throughout the company. There are all these passionate people taking risks by and exploring projects and being super excited about it. One of the great things about being in research is that we get to talk with like a whole bunch of different product groups.

I've talked to people from every division, and it's just so fun to see like how like many really skilled, talented people are working on so many different things with so many different exciting problems. The company is so broad and works in so many different areas -- it's sort of like being in like a research Candy Land. Every day I hear about something new and exciting and meet another brilliant and passionate person doing amazing things – it's just constantly refreshing and awesome.

I understand you went to Burning Man last year. Did you notice any similarities between Burning Man and MSR?
One of the things that I loved about Burning Man is that it's like a playground of unfettered creativity. Internal and external critics are turned off, and it's a place to incubate art. Some of that art ends up just being dumb, but the freedom to express gives people the opportunity to be brilliant. I think that research has a lot of similarities. There's a deeply creative aspect to it, and a lot of research is just finding inspiration and creating ideas – some of which are admittedly just dumb. But at Microsoft I've always found the freedom to ask really out-there questions and explore ideas.

Sumit, sing me some links!

• All about Songsmith: research.microsoft.com/songsmith
• Download Songsmith (The download comes with a free trial for 6 hours of use)
• Scoble's Songsmith demo
• Sumit's MSR page
• Sumit's blog
• Sumit's music