Just the word makes some
people shudder.
The
Japanese word
stems
from the words: "kara" (空) which means 'empty,'
and "oke" which is short for
'orchestra'. The words together make a contraction meaning 'empty
orchestra' literally. Because the term is half Japanese and half
English it is considered a foreign word and usually written in
katakana.
The term karaoke can be interpreted as "virtual orchestra" because one
can specify a key to the music and start singing along without the
presence of a live band or orchestra. In the United States, the word is
often pronounced incorrectly as care-ree-OH-kee or ker-OH-kee. The
original Japanese pronunciation is ka-ra-uh-KEH.
If
you've never done
karaoke, it isn't hard at all. At
most venues, you select a song from a list, write your name, the number
of the song and the title on a slip and give it to the karaoke
host/hostess (KJ, for karaoke jockey). When they call your name, you go
up, and follow the words on the television screen. The words are one
color, and when you're supposed to sing, the words are highlighted with
a contrasting color.
For those who like a long-winded treatise on the subject, here you go!
The karaoke industry started in Japan in the early 1970s when singer
Daisuke Inoue (Inoue Daisuke)
was asked by frequent guests in the Utagoe Kissa, where he performed,
to provide a recording of his performance so that they could sing along
on a company-sponsored vacation. Realizing the potential for the
market, Inoue made a tape recorder that played a song for a 100-yen
coin.
This
was
the first karaoke machine. Instead of selling karaoke
machines, he leased them out, so that stores did not have to buy new
songs on their own. Originally it was considered a fad
which was lacking the "live atmosphere" of a real performance. It was
also regarded as somewhat expensive since 100 yen in the 1970s was the
price of two typical lunches.
However,
it caught on as a popular
entertainment. Karaoke machines were initially placed in restaurants or
hotel rooms; soon, new businesses called "Karaoke Box," with
compartmented rooms became popular.
In
2004, Daisuke Inoue was awarded the tongue-in-cheek Ig Nobel Peace
Prize for inventing karaoke, "thereby providing an entirely new way for
people to learn to tolerate each other."
Early
karaoke machines used cassette tapes but technological advances
replaced this with CDs, VCDs, laserdiscs and, currently, DVDs. In 1992,
Taito introduced the X2000
that fetched music via a dial-up telephone network. Its repertoire of
music and graphics was limited, but the advantage of continuous updates
and the smaller machine size saw it gradually replace traditional
machines. Karaoke machines connected via fiber-optic links to provide
instant high-quality music and video are becoming increasingly popular. Karaoke
soon spread to the rest of Asia and then to the United
States in the 1990s. Facilities such as karaoke bars or "KTV boxes"
provided the venue, equipment and software for amateur singers to
entertain each other. Its
popularity has spread rapidly to the United States, Canada
and other Western countries. Some people still regard it as "hokey" and
simply a method for the intoxicated to embarrass themselves, but as the
novelty has worn off and the available selection of music has exploded,
more and more people within the industry see it as a very profitable
form of lounge and nightclub entertainment. It is not uncommon for some
bars to have karaoke performances seven nights a week, commonly with
much more high-end sound equipment than the small, standalone machines
noted above.
Dance
floors and lighting effects are also becoming common
sights in karaoke bars. Lyrics are often displayed on multiple TV sets
around the bar, including big screens.
It
is also
growing in popularity in the United Kingdom,
with Martha Lane Fox, the founder of lastminute.com, helping finance
what is being touted as a chain of upmarket Karaoke venues, called
Lucky Voice.
A
basic
karaoke machine consists of audio input, a means of altering
the pitch of the music (not the singer) and an audio output. Some
low-end machines attempt to provide vocal suppression so that one can
feed regular songs into the machine and suppress the voice of the
original singer, however this is not very effective (see below). Most
common machines are audio mixers with microphone input built-in with
CD+G, Video CD, Laser Disc, or DVD players. CD+G players use a special
track called subcode
to encode the lyrics and pictures displayed on the screen, while the
other formats natively display both audio and video. In some countries,
karaoke with video lyrics display capabilities is called KTV.
Most
karaoke machines have technology that electronically changes the pitch
of music so that amateur singers can sing
along to any music source by choosing a key that is appropriate for
their vocal range, while maintaining the original tempo of the song.
(There were some very old systems that used cassettes, and these
changed the pitch by altering playback speed, but none are still on the
market, and their commercial use is virtually nonexistent.)
A
popular
game using karaoke is to randomly type in a number and
call up a song, which participants take a turn to try to sing as much
as they can. In some machines, this game is pre-programmed and may be
limited to a genre so that they cannot call up an obscure national
anthem that none of them can sing. This game has come to be called
"Kamikaze Karaoke" in some parts of the United States and Canada.
Many
low-end entertainment systems have a karaoke mode that attempts to
remove the vocal track from general (non-karaoke) audio CDs. This is
done by center removal
which exploits the fact that in most music the vocals are in the
center. This means that the voice, as part of the music, has equal
volume on both stereo channels and no phase difference. To get the
quasi-karaoke (mono)
track the left channel of the original audio is subtracted from the
right channel. The crudeness of that approach is reflected in the often
poor performance of voice removal. Common effects are hearing the echo
of the voice track (due to stereo
echo being put on the vocals), and also other instruments that happen
to be mixed into the center get removed (snare/bass drum, solo
instruments), degrading this approach to hardly more than a gimmick in
those devices.
Some computer programs that serve a similar purpose to the standard
karaoke machine have been developed that use MIDI
instrumentation to generate the accompaniment rather than a recorded
track. This has the advantage of making transposition technically
trivial and also shrinks the information needed to provide the
accompaniment to the point where it is easy to transfer it across the
Internet, even over slow connections. The standard file format used is
*.KAR, which is an extension of the standard .MID MIDI disk format, and
can be played unaltered by MIDI player software.
A
karaoke
game was initially released for the Nintendo Famicom
but its limited computing ability made for a short catalog of songs,
and therefore reduced replay value. As a result, karaoke games were
considered little more than collector's items until games saw release
in the higher-capacity DVD format. Karaoke Revolution, created for the
PlayStation 2 by Konami
and released in North America in 2003, is a console game in which a
single player sings along with on-screen guidance, and receives a score
based on his or her pitch, timing, and rhythm. The game soon spawned
four more versions, Karaoke Revolution Vol. 2, Karaoke Revolution Vol.
3, Karaoke Revolution Party Edition, and CMT Presents Karaoke
Revolution: Country. While the original Karaoke Revolution was also
eventually released for the Microsoft Xbox
console in late 2004, the new online-enabled version included the
ability to download additional song packs through the console's
exclusive Xbox Live service. A
similar
game, SingStar,
published by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, is particularly
popular in the European and Australasian markets. Other similar titles
in the rhythm-based game genre include Bemani's Dance Dance Revolution,
Guitar Freaks, and Drum Mania.
The
takeoff of Video CDs in East and Southeast Asia
is partly due to the cheap but tolerable quality, and partly due to the
popularity of karaoke. Many VCD players in Southeast Asia have built-in
Karaoke function.
If users disable the singer's voice and leave the music alone, they can
play karaoke. In the past, there were only pop-song karaoke VCDs.
Nowadays, different types of karaoke VCDs are available. Cantonese
opera karaoke VCD is now a big hit among the elderly in Hong Kong.
In
2003,
several companies started offering a karaoke service on mobile phones,
using a Java MIDlet
that runs with a text file containing the words and a MIDI file with
the music. This is still a budding service and it is unclear whether it
will become popular; however, some Mobile Karaoke providers, such as
Karaokini, have begun to achieve commercial success.
Starting
in 2003, much software has been released for hosting
karaoke shows, and playing karaoke songs on a personal computer.
Instead of having to carry around hundreds of CD-G's or laserdiscs, a
KJ can 'rip' their entire library onto a hard drive, and play the songs
and lyrics from that.
Additionally,
new software permits singers to sing and listen to one
another over the Internet with collaborators/audience from all around
the world.
Chinese
automobile maker, Geely Automobile, received much press in 2003 for
being the first to equip a car, their "Beauty Leopard", with a karaoke
machine as standard equipment. Karaoke is often also found as a feature
in aftermarket in-car DVD players.
The
CD+G
format of karaoke disc, which contains the lyrics on a specially
encoded subcode track, has heretofore required special—and
expensive—equipment to play it. Commercial players have come
down in
price, though, and some unexpected devices (including the Sega Saturn
videogame console)
can decode the graphics; in fact, karaoke machines, including video and
sometimes recording capability, are often popular electronics items for
sale in toy stores and electronics stores.
Additionally,
there is software for Windows, Pocket PC, Linux, and
Macintosh PC's that can decode and display karaoke song tracks, though
usually these must be ripped
off of the CD first, and possibly compressed. Recently, Karaoke
software was also made available for mobile telephones, mainly in Asian
countries.
In
addition to CD+G and Software-based Karaoke, microphone-based Karaoke
players enjoy popularity mainly in North America and some Asian
countries such as the Philippines.
Microphone-based Karaoke Players only need to be connected to a TV -
and in some cases to a power outlet, in other cases they run on
batteries. These devices often sport advanced features, such as pitch
correction and special sound effects. Some companies offer Karaoke
content for paid download to extend the song library in
microphone-based Karaoke systems. CD+G,
DVD,
VCD and microphone-based players are most popular for
home use. Due to song selection and quality of recordings, CD+G is the
most popular format for English and Spanish. It's also important to
note that CD+G has plain text with a plain color background, whereas
VCD and DVD usually have plain text over a moving picture or video
background. VCD and DVD are the most common format for Asian singers
due to music availability and largely due to the moving picture/video
background.
Sources:
Encyclopedia Brittanica
World Book Encyclopedia Wikipedia
