Technology

Though karaoke was at first an entertainment mainly for business people, it has grown to be a worldwide amusement, thanks to technological development.

Originally, karaoke music was played on cassette tapes. As karaoke became widely popular, homemade backing tapes were replaced by professionally produced CDs, VCDs, laser discs and, currently, DVDs. In 1992, Taito (a Japanese developer of video game software and arcade hardware) 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 fibre-optic links to provide instant high-quality music and video are becoming increasingly popular.

Many karaoke machines, particularly the larger ones in bars and clubs, have multiple television screens hooked up to it. One screen will be turned to the singer so he/she can see the lyrics and the other screens will be facing the audience. Often, there is a generic “music video” playing on the screen, with the lyrics lighting up on the bottom. More recently, home karaoke machines (usually a scaled-down version) and software for home computers and game consoles have become available, making the amusement formerly limited to night spots possible in the home.

A basic karaoke machine consists of a microphone, a means of altering the pitch of the recorded music, 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 rarely 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.

Most karaoke machines have technology that electronically changes the pitch of the 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” or “Karaoke Roulette” 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 regular 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 this 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 they 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 Bermani’s Dance Dance Revolution, GuitarFreaks, Donkey Konga and DrumMania.

Karaoke CD

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 a 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.