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Karaoke What is it?

The Japanese word stems from the words kara (?) which is short for karano, meaning "empty", and oke which is short for okesutora, meaning "orchestra". The words together make a contraction literally meaning "empty orchestra".

This term used to be slang for media where pre-recorded music substitutes for a live performance, thus it is 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 mispronounced as /k?ri'o?ki/ or /ka ro?' ki/, the later of which conforms to phonics in the American English language. In Britain it is often pronounced /kæ??'??k?/. The Japanese pronunciation is /ka?aoke/. (These pronunciations are in IPA.)

It has been common to provide musical entertainment at a dinner or a party in Japan, as in the rest of the world, for a long time. This tradition appeared in the earliest Japanese mythology. For a long time, singing and dancing remained one of the few adult entertainments in rural areas. Noh was initially played at a tea party and guests were welcomed to join in for a cheer or a shout of praise. Dancing and singing was also a part of a samurai's education. It was expected that every samurai have a dance or a song they could perform. During the Taisho period, Utagoe Kissa, (literally song coffee shop), became popular and customers sung to a live performance of a music band.

Japanese 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 Japanese sing-along 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. (See below "Public Places for Karaoke" and "Terms of Karaoke" for a description of karaoke boxes.) 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."

Roberto del Rosario, a Filipino inventor who called his sing-along system Minus-One, now holds the patent for the device now commonly known as the karaoke machine. Following a court battle with a Chinese company which claimed to have invented the system, his patents were issued in 1983 and 1986.[1]

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.

A big karaoke-box building in Tokyo, which was featured in the movie Lost In Translation.
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.

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 (boom boxes etc) 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.

MIDI applications and *.kar files
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 which includes embedded lyrics and can be played unaltered by MIDI player software.

Video game
A karaoke game was initially released for the NES 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 higher-capacity DVD formats. 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, GuitarFreaks, Donkey Konga, and DrumMania.

Karaoke VCD
The takeoff of Video CDs in East and Southeast Asia is partly due to the popularity of karaoke. Many VCD players in Southeast Asia have built-in Karaoke function. On stereo recordings, one speaker will play the music with the vocal track, and the other speaker will play the music without the vocal track. So, to sing karaoke, users play the music-only track through both speakers. 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.

Karaoke on mobile phones
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.

Karaoke on computers and Internet
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/audiences from all around the world.

Various online karaoke websites provide the opportunity for karaoke enthusiasts to participate and share in a worldwide karaoke community. Users can create a personal, online karaoke profiles, which store their individual recordings and even allow video synching. Examples of free sites are www.bix.com and www.singshot.com.

As of right now (2007), companies such as Sound Choice and Stellar Records are taking law actions against computer-run karaoke systems. They say it is against fair use laws and that "fair use" does not apply to commercial use. They also say that format-shifting for any use is also against "fair use" laws.

Karaoke in automobiles
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.

Alternative playback devices
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 PCs 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 limited graphical capabilities, whereas VCD and DVD usually have 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.

Popular brands of karaoke CD+Gs and DVDs
All-Star Karaoke
Chartbuster Karaoke
Party Tyme Karaoke
Pocket Songs Karaoke
Pop Hits Monthly
Sound Choice Karaoke
Sunfly Karaoke
Top Tunes Karaoke
Karaoke Camstar