Karaoke

We are at the Vice Mayors house having a little karaoke party in the back yard in a napa hut complete with a karaoke system, surround sound and a forty inch television and lots of beer. It was a very fun night with lots of food and good entertainment. For a larger veiw click on the picture.

Karaoke Kids

Karaoke (カラオケ, Karaoke? from Japanese kara, "empty" or "void", and ōkesutora, "orchestra") (pronounced IPA: /ˌkæriˈoʊki/ or /kəˈroʊki/; in Japanese IPA: [karaoke]; listen (help·info)) is a form of entertainment in which amateur singers sing along with recorded music using a microphone and a PA system. The music is typically a well-known pop song in which the voice of the original singer is removed or reduced in volume. Lyrics are usually displayed on a video screen, along with a moving symbol or changing color, to guide the singer. In some countries, karaoke with video lyrics display capabilities is called KTV. It is often misspelled 'kareoke' (ka-ree-oh-kee) due to the English pronunciation.

Karaoke Kids

Karaoke today was popularized by the Japanese musician Daisuke Inoue in Kobe, Japan in the early 1970s [1]. After becoming popular in Japan, karaoke spread to East and Southeast Asia during the 1980s and subsequently to other parts of the world in its modern state.

Karaoke Kids

In Japan it has long been common to provide musical entertainment at a dinner or a party. Japanese drummer Daisuke Inoue 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.

Karaoke Kids

Instead of selling his 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 boxes, 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."
Inoue never bothered to patent his invention, losing his chance to become one of Japan's richest men. 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, del Rosario's patents were issued in 1983 and 1986, more than a decade after Inoue's original unpatented invention of the device in 1971.[2]
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 Kids

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.
Karaoke has also spread to the United States, Canada and other Western countries. As the available selection of music has increased, 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, stand-alone 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.

Karaoke Kids

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.)

Karaoke Kids

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.[citation needed]
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 Sega Saturn also has a "mute vocals" feature that is based on the same principle and is also able to adjust the pitch of the song to match the singers vocal range.
The crudeness of this approach is reflected in the often poor performance of voice removal. Common effects are hearing the reverberation of the voice track (due to stereo reverb 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.