Being Musical with Karaoke
How many times have you gone into a bar and seen some drunk slurring their way through their turn at the karaoke machine? Do you sit back confidentially in your chair knowing that you would never do such a foolish thing? Or do you secretly long to get up there yourself to belt out your favorite musical number? Either way you will see that the karaoke machine has come a long way since its acceptance into the American music scene in the 1990s.
Karaoke has its beginnings in Japan where it was important to be able to entertain your guests at a party if you lived in the countryside. This was the most entertainment that was available to you at this time. To encourage singing and dancing music was played and guests were invited to sign for each other. As well, the great samurai warriors were taught the importance of music as part of their training. Each one of them was to have their own composition that they could perform when asked. In Japan during the early 1900s to around 1920 was the Taisho period. At that time there were clubs where people could go to hear a live music performance and sing along with it. This spurred the next step.
A singer who liked to perform at these clubs got an idea. He recorded his voice and put it into a machine that would play it back if a one hundred yen coin was first inserted. Although thought to be somewhat expensive, it nonetheless became popular. This was the beginning of the karaoke machine. Soon there were karaoke machines available for public use in restaurants or bars. Then karaoke boxes started popping up. These were little rooms where the customer could go to sing without bothering anyone else or just because they were too shy to sing in front of the crowd.
Some years later an inventor filed patents on a sing along machine he called Minus-One. Although there is proof that this came years after the 1970s invention by Daisuke Inoue the other man was granted a patent after a lengthy court fight.
Early machines relied on cassette tapes to play the music and the sound did lack somewhat. It was also more difficult then to lower the voice while not disturbing the musical quality. With the invention of CDs, laser discs and VCDs this changed. In 1992 new technology enabled the introduction of a dial-up service. This made it easier to download new music into the machines and improved the quality of the music. Video has been added to some machines as well.
Many of the better karaoke machines can change the pitch of the musical number to better match that of the person singing. They simply press a button to choose the key that they think they sing in. This can cut down on some of the embarrassing moments. Before they were able to do this with the current technology the music was changed by the speed of the song being altered. This did not have results nearly as good. These machines are almost impossible to locate now. Karaoke is so popular that there are even games played using them. One such game involves the machines being programmed to play a number of songs and the participants must do their best to sing along. The winner is the person who knows the most words. These machines get specially programmed so that odd things like national anthems that could not possibly be known do not come up. The game is not just popular in Asia, but is very well known in Canada and the United States.
