Hart's Dynamic Media Blog

I've noticed that there hasn't been as much discussion as we expected about Soundbooths AutoComposer feature and I realized that the downloads for the Soundbooth Scores are a little buried on Adobe Labs. We've added some more links (including a sticky post in the forum) to highlight them better, but I thought the best thing to do was to play with it myself and post some of my results.

First, some background: AutoComposer lets you open a special file, called a Soundbooth Score Template, that represents a whole song. The Scores are created and recorded by musicians but include a whole lot of metadata and a lot more audio than a normal, linear song. All that metadata and audio is arranged in a special way so that Soundbooth can adjust the length and some of the feel of the music based on input from you, but without requiring any specific musical knowledge to get good results.

What I did was take a video we've used in some demos and cut it down to about 40 seconds. I then used the AutoComposer to add three different soundtracks, one for each of the Soundbooth Scores we've posted on the Labs site. I also limited myself to spend no more than five minutes playing with each score to see what I could get done very quickly. I've linked to each of the results below. (I decided to link to them in another window so you wouldn't have to download them all if you didn't want to--make sure your pop-up blocker is off before you click.)

First, the original movie with a piece of the original soundtrack:
View Original Video

Now, this is the one I think turned out the best because the music is electronic, which matches the feel of the video:
Video with River of Unreality Score

And the other two scores. First, there's New York Night which is more "atmospheric" or "cinematic." It doesn't match the mood as well, but it still works:
Video with New York Night Score
And then there's Slow Dirty Funk, which is, well, you get the idea.
Video with Slow Dirty Funk Score

Go play around with them yourself and see what you can do! We plan on including dozens of these Soundbooth Scores with Soundbooth. Also, when we nail down the format completely (the Scores are in just as much beta as the software!) we'll release instructions so that anyone who is more comfortable with creating music can create their own for use in Soundbooth.