Photo Details

May

Carrying on a tradition originating in Japan and elsewhere in Asia, Rachel and Song Min sing their hearts out at Do Re Mi Karaoke. Clubs today have popped up around the US cities, boasting high-end sound equipment, private rooms, and songs in many Asian languages, as well as English.

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Karaoke is a Japanese word that means, literally, "empty orchestra." This form of entertainment in which people take turns singing popular songs into a microphone over prerecorded backing tracks originated in Japan in the 1970s and quickly spread across Asia.

The origin of the name karaoke is in dispute. One claim is that a Japanese musician, Daisuke Inoue, developed the machine in 1971, after guests at parties repeatedly asked him to provide a recording of his performances so they could sing along. Inoue recognized a marketing opportunity. He made a tape recorder that played a song for a 100-yen coin and then leased the machines to hotels and restaurants so the establishments didn't need to buy new songs on their own. Originally, karaoke was considered an expensive fad, lacking the excitement of a live performance. But the fad caught on, and new businesses called "karaoke boxes," with individual rooms for singing, became popular.

In 2004, after the practice had spread to East and Southeast Asia in the 1980s and then to other parts of the world, Inoue was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize, an American parody of the Nobel Prizes. The Ig Nobel Committee called karaoke "an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other."

Inoue never patented his invention, but a Filipino inventor, Roberto del Rosario, who developed a sing-along system in 1975 called "Minus-One," did, and he holds the patent for the device now commonly called the "karaoke machine." Del Rosario's patents were issued in the 1980s, after a court battle with a Japanese company that claimed to have invented the system.

Today, lounges and nightclubs around the world have karaoke performances 7 nights a week, with high-end sound equipment, dance floors and lighting effects, and multiple television screens that display not only song lyrics but video games as well. Today, karaoke is available for mobile phones and home computers—and in South Korea in the 1990s, even taxicabs had karaoke machines, known as "caroke."

A quick search of the Internet will lead you to many sites on karaoke (information here from Wikipedia), and you can learn about Do Re Mi Karaoke, where this photo was shot, at www.doremi-karaoke.com.

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