Guitar Hero - A learning tool?

It's easy to following along and strum notes on your plastic guitar as you watch a screen filled with colorful dots and a catchy rhythm.  Before you know it, you are awarded ROCKSTAR! and truly know what it's like to be an award-winning musician.

Or do you?

For most rock musicians, coming up with a catchy melody is easy to do - you think of it in your head, write it down on paper, and turn it into a number one hit, right?  Wrong.  While the melody of a song is easy to come up with, finding the right accompaniment is hard without formal music training.  

"It's easier to come up with a melody than come up with a series of chords to harmonize that melody," said Ching-Hua Chuan, a former Taiwanese rock guitarist turned computer scientist at Barry University in Miami Shores, Fla.

To tackle this problem and as part of her Ph.D. dissertation at USC, she created a computer program that can generate accompaniment specific to the unique styles of music of bands. Chuan "trained" the program to five of her favorite artists (i.e. Green Day, Radiohead, etc.) and had the program create accompaniment to a certain song's melody.  She then compared the "created" version to the actual version.

While some kinks still have to be worked out to improve accuracy, her work can be important to assisting in new musicians as they begin to create their own music.  

Check out the full story here on MSNBC to learn more about Chuan's program.  

-Michael Strachan