TV Show Rates Singers With Computer Program
By Morelli
A new television program being aired in Portugal called Atreve-te A Cantar (translates “Dare to Sing”), has adopted a new way to evaluate contestants’ singing talent in its karaoke-style game show. The show democratizes the contestant selection process in the same way as “The Price Is Right” by giving a microphone to each of the 100 members of the audience, and having the whole crowd sing a few bars of a pop song. Then, a computer program analyzes each person’s singing, and selects two contestants to battle against each other for up to $33,000.
The technology is called SAM (Musical Analysis System), and gauges how well tuned and in time a singer is. The system doesn’t work very well, and reminded me of video games Singstar and Karaoke Revolution, with the exact same setbacks. Ridiculously, SAM makes very dubious, unfair decisions almost every time.
On its web site, the show says it isn’t looking for “the next big star in music”. They don’t want to be the Portuguese version of Britain’s Got Talent, which recently catapulted Susan Boyle to superstar status overnight. However, with $33,000 in play, contestants are extremely motivated to impress the machine.
In the first round, SAM picks 2 singers out of 100. To be sure, those two singers are generally better than the majority. What comes next is essentially karaoke, with a percentage score given at the end of each singer’s performance. The contestants get one try, in which the computer selects choice words from the song’s lyrics, and gives a score for the contestants’ performance in tone and time for each word. For Leona Lewis’ Bleeding Love, one of the key words was “keep”. For a result, the computer calculates the average score for the key words that were analyzed in the song.
After the short performance, which is nowhere near the full song, contestants then watch an onscreen meter fill up to the score that SAM has calculated. For thousands of dollars, it seemed a bit ridiculous to see the generated scores pop out. 56. 74. 61. No jury, no opinion other than SAM’s. In short, I watched people that sang with passion, vibrato and vocal inflection get beaten by others who had the luck to hit specific notes clearly and lifelessly.
The computer was so wrong, that what started off as just a few chuckles, eventually turned into pity as I watched this girl get 42 out of 100 points. She isn’t the next Alicia Keys, but I guarantee that she sung with more emotion than most of the other contestants, and would have beaten her competition handily had the audience been more involved in her evaluation. What a disappointment.
Karaoke and Guitar Hero-style video games are extremely popular, but it seems like technology hasn’t yet reached the point where it can judge music in a human way. Computers can auto-tune vocalists, and even repeat phrases and notes at your command. But at this point in time, leaving $33,000 in the “hands” of an algorithm, to dole out as it sees fit, seems to be more than a little unfair. Maybe, in this case, technology has helped mankind take a step in the opposite direction.
Do you know of any similar, faulty music shows?
