uJam is a new service that lets you create music and melodies by transforming sounds made through singing, humming, whistling, or just noise-making into a corresponding melody created in your choice of instruments.
It basically turns crap into something closer to “gold”.
Anyone without any ability to play guitar can now simply sing the song that the guitar track would go on and uJam will transform the recorded voice into a guitar hitting the same notes. You can also edit the tracks by auto tuning, tempo and pitch changing… you get the drift.
The founders are planning to market this as the amateur’s recording studio (which it is), and possibly audio greeting “card” platform.
Is this a cool technology? Well it is fully web-based, and it can make you sound like a Marimba (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marimba), so it’s a yes in my book.
The concern here is that social media sharing capabilities will encourage people to share and show all their friends their latest amateur music creation. uJam could flood the Internet with mediocre recordings.
How will real musicians feel about this product? It will be a while until we find out since the service is still in Beta (invite-only Alpha actually, according to them), so technically only techies have access (like myself).
Does this have a chance to pose a realistic threat to musicians-of-trade?
I saw this comment on a related article from TC user sYgnal:
“Come on… That’s not fair! You shouldn’t be displaying the secret technology that most mainstream “artists” use to make their “music” nowadays. Looks like no more award shows for Kanye….*smirk* “
Fortunately uJams’s rise to success still faces one hurdle. Music licensing. uJam could be commiting copyright infringement everytime users sing and edit popular songs.
