We recently spoke to a French company called Mist Technologies, which is investing a lot of money in what it calls 'sound separation' technology. The idea is that it can take apart a sound track, separating it into its components (for music, that means isolating the instruments) and put it back together in surround sound. The company says it can therefore offer truly high definition surround sound to movie companies, giving us viewers more intense, better quality soundtracks.

It demonstrated the system using clips from French Edith Piaf biopic La Vie En Rose, showing off the difference between the standard soundtrack and the Mist version. It remains to be seen whether it takes off among movie studios, and it's going to be a while before it filters down to any new films, but in the meantime there's SongCooker.

SongCooker uses the same technology but lets the rest of us play around with it. The idea is that you upload a tune and it does the hard work of separating out the component instruments. You can then use the Flash-based console to move the instruments around in a 2D space or isolate them to remix the song.

At the moment it only works with a few songs the company has uploaded, but look out for a more flexible version in 2008.