Microsoft patents the understanding of music

THE ANCIENT art of understanding music has been patented by the software giant Microsoft.

Apparently the government has awarded Vole the rights over the big idea of "training a trainee to analyze media, such as music, in order to recognize and assess the fundamental properties of any piece of media, such as a song or a segment of a song."

The patent, which can be found here, seems to suggest that if you follow Microsoft's secret technique you will end up ‘double grooving'. "The double grooving phase leverages the skills of the experts that defined the canonical set of classification terms to ensure that new listeners, even though exposed to the tutorial, appropriately recognize all fundamental musical properties."

I will look forward to watching Steve Ballmer explaining his double grooving process to my old piano teacher, whose idea of teaching music involved playing such tune a day classics as Beethoven's Ode to Joy for one hand and bayonet. µ