Here's an amazing little bit of code which hacker (and alumnus of MIT's
Hyperinstruments Group) Tristan Jehan put together at the recent Music Hack Day in San Francisco. The premise of the Python program is simple: take any song and make it
swing. The code accomplishes this task by taking each measure and time-stretching the first half of each beat while time-shrinking the second half. Then blammo -- it swings. Honestly, it's best you just listen to the results yourself... you'll never hear "Enter Sandman" the same way again. Check out a few examples after the break.
Around the World -- Daft Punk
Money For Nothing -- Dire Straits
Alt, 
posted May 26th 2010 9:02PM
I wonder what My Humps by Black Eyed Peas would sound like?
@Jive Turkey Dear god, that would sound so amazing.
I clearly don't know enough about swing music to appreciate this fully, but I wonder what happens if you give it a swing song to begin with.
Also I would call this mods any song, not "hacks" it.
They should make an app for this. Would be very popular, just enter in whatever song you want and it gives you an "swinged" mp3 of that song...
@abedinthehouse
Website:
http://glasnost.us/~knifa/swinger/index.php/
@Timerider
lol poker face sounds awesome
I make any song swing by dancing to it. I guess I hacked dance?
This is awesome. The swing versions sound almost as good as the originals. It's like discovering the song for the first time again. This would be great for a dance competition.
Arrg, samples don't play on iDevices =(
@Scanimal Inc They play perfectly on my Nexus One.
@jessseg
Flash on mobile devices is obviously useless and has no application. hah
@jessseg enjoy your defunct product.
@petepete
You may enjoy your lack of Flash...
@kapanak
Steve Jobs hates swing. Its clear now.
This is pretty sweet.
This is just awesome.
Cool, just as long as they don't touch Led Zeppelin.
Around of the world sounds sexy.
Holy mother of pearl that is made of win. Around the World is hilarious.
Ghostbusters theme sounds pretty awesome.
http://www.glasnost.us/~knifa/swinger/index.php/view/537
@Timerider
Oh, and here's Still Alive.
http://soundcloud.com/eli173/still-alive-swinger-edition
"Money For Nothing" actually suits the swing style more than its original style. It almost sounds country.
wow, around the world sound awful.
i left "enter sandman" playing while browsing the rest of engadget...
now i can't get it out of my head :)
next up: make everything drum and bass (((:
Custom kitchen deliveries!
Really good idea and well executed. Give that student a job somebody.
Technically, there's more to swing than just- blammo- playing the offbeat late. You also have to slightly accent the downbeat. The Dire Straights track was already accenting the downbeats, which it why it sounds pretty good as a swing example. "Enter Sandman" sounds less natural to me, though.
Also, what the hell is "alt" engadget? The logo is GREEN! What dimension have I been teleported to!
Mark Knopfler belongs in the same Guitar God pantheon alongside Hendrix, Page, Clapton, Gilmour, and Vaughn. Shame he gave up Rock, though.
@cwalters74 What would happen if you ran this program against a song that was already swing?
If anyone puts a dream theater song through this, I will hunt them down and remove their teeth
@Crb
...worlds would collide
Nnngghh. Sounds more rum-ti-tum-ti-tum to me than the lovely lazy swing-beat.
Wonder if there's a way to more gently stretch and drop the beat which doesn't leave it so choppy...
@Crb It would shift from a soft swing, to a hard swing, or a hard swing to a harder swing. It's not an off-or-on thing, it's a more-or-less thing.
For those who wanted to try this themselves, I put up an app in Windows Azure which lets you upload any MP3 and swingifies it: http://swingify.cloudapp.net.
Sex Pistols Pretty Vacant scrubbed up well:
http://glasnost.us/~knifa/swinger/index.php/view/2963