He's a well-respected man about town

[austin_dern]

I got a big surprise from the old-time radio today. It's from Lum and Abner, a charming 15-minute character-driven serial comedy, principally rambling conversations about what's going on rather than acted-out action, about the residents of tiny Pine Ridge, Arkansas. Most of the characters were played by Chet Lauck and Norris ``Tuffy'' Goff, and the stories drifted endearingly, like The Andy Griffith Show without the relentless narrative pace. It ran from 1931 to 1955.

(For one season they tried the show as a half-hour sitcom, with live studio audience and self-contained stories, which worked about as well as a laugh track on Law and Order would. Mercifully they went back to the quarter-hour, audience-free format, with sprawling serial stories.)

Anyway, Pine Ridge went through a brief infatuation with Society and Culture; and Abner, arriving late to the fad, gets into it big time, driving his wife and friends crazy. Lum was describing the nightclub Abner dragged his wife and Lum to, the musicians he tipped excessively, the dance floor he dragged his wife onto ... ``They was doin' what Abner called, ah, karaoke.'' ``Elizabeth dancing the karaoke?'' ``Well, he was. She was just standing there, blinking, sort of ... embarrassed, I think.''

Um ... guh? I can't track down the airdate, but who heard of karaoke in the US before 1980, and when was it dancing, and what changed between at-latest 1955 and 1980?

Trivia: On STS-1 Columbia's computers had eight separately executable programs, the longest of which was 105.2 32-bit kilowords. Source: Development of the Space Shuttle, 1972-1981, T A Heppenheimer.

Currently Reading: Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré 's Maps, Peter Galison.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

I'd guess they're talking about the Carioca, which is a sort of Samba. http://www.dancelovers.com/samba_history.htm

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Carioca sounds very plausible, given the phrase ``dancing the [ karaoke ]'' and the following mention of the nightclub. (Just before they'd gone to a Chinese restaurant, making for even more etymological confusion.) They pronounced it two ways, too, carry-oh-kee and carri-oh-kuh, either of which seems plausible for an Arkansas accent pronunciation of either word.

I usually take my old-time radio as it comes, but specifically tracked this one down so I'd know I had the reference right. I should be able to pin down an airdate soon, but program logs are maybe about as disorganized as you'd think.

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

I think I've heard 1 episode of Lum & Abner on Sirius' Radio Classics channel. I don't remember much about it, though. I think it was one of the full half-hour episodes.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The half-hour episodes weren't the performers at their best. (I understand there are some movies as well, including three TV episode pilots which were converted to a ``movie'' once a TV prospect fell through.) If you do catch the quarter-hour partially improvised episodes you get a fairer estimate of the show's strength.

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Ahh, Xolo's answer would appear to solve this temporal warp mystery, as the Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karaoke) notes that the first karaoke machine was invented in "the early 1970s".

'In 2004, Daisuke Inoue was dubiously awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize for inventing karaoke, "thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other."'

Unless, of course, Daisuke Inoue resembled Jon Pertwee..

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I did check the various online histories of karaoke to try tracking down its possible ``prehistory'' and didn't find anything predating about 1980, but I didn't think that altogether too decisive. Most people wouldn't think twice of saying the fax machine was a 20th century invention either.

And there's not anything about the idea of karaoke -- here I mean playing a known, popular song without a voice track, and with lyrics available for a local performer -- that requires 1980 technology; it could be ``invented'' the moment anyone had record players. A cultural footnote that gets resurrected and turned into something huge wouldn't be that improbable.

Still, the Carioca is the most probable interpretation, all things considered. It just sounds anachronistic.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I think a major factor in what we call Karaoke is having the lyrics timed WITH the backing music. Simply having them available on sheet music.. with musical notation and musical accompaniment.. has been done well since the 1800's- by which we have Hymnals in churches.

In the same way silent movies had musical accompaniement, n'est ce pas?

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

True, essential to karaoke is that the lyrics are presented roughly in time to the music, but that could certainly be done automatically as well -- in fact, it's more or less how the follow-the-bouncing-ball animations from the 1920s on were created, although in the earliest days it was easiest to work the lyrics slide by hand and use a baton for the ball. It seems like this could have been mechanized by a sufficiently clever design.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I'm not familiar precisely with those follow-the-bouncing-ball animations worked, could you elucidate? I only know of follow-the-bouncing-ball from the Mitch Miller TV iteration, and its ilk, which would be an on-screen method.

However for lyrics presentation without screen display, you'd need a solid amount of paper for each song. And have to swap out reels of some sort. It'd seem a screen format would be needed...
For that, one would need either a movie screen, slide screen, or television screen; A movie screen doesn't fit in bars (where the liquor usually needed to get people to Karaoke is applied), and the television screen puts the technology at its earliest into the 50's for mass acceptance. A slide screen/projector could be quite workable- in fact, many churches are using them nowdays for new songs which aren't in hymnals. But the closest I've seen it lyric-matched there is the use of a piece of paper, either leading or trailing the current line, to keep people on pace; most times it's simply a lyric sheet.

Although the earliest Karaoke was- as Porsupah's link to Wikipedia showed- by cassette tape, the music could have been created on LP, as well; but the use of Compact Discs increased both the portability and random access of music for Karaoke systems, which I think was a factor in allowing it to flourish. Also, CDs being a data-storing format allowed the music and lyrics to be stored together in one item.

I imagine in another 5-10 years there will principally be specialized hard-drive music players for Karaoke; my sister has said most Karaoke DJs work heavily with laptop computers and are shifting towards using them as the central control- though they still need quite a bit of other audio machinery.

There are rather a lot of fore-runners of Karaoke... including the aforementioned Mitch Miller (who, interestingly enough, is still alive..) but I think someone trying the concept in the 30's or so would wind up with a rather unweildy system. By the 50's, it might be much more streamlined; and the 1980's and the advent of the television/monitor as a replay (not merely broadcast) and compact disc were much riper conditions for the invention.

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, the Follow-The-Bouncing-Ball format that the Fleischer Brothers worked up for their cartoons, from about 1925 on, was to basically split the screen into two frames, the animation above, and below, a scroll of white text on black background, with a ``bouncing ball'' consisting of a white-painted ball on the end of a long black stick. As the music moved along, a performer would hold the ball over a note and bounce it forward with each word as appropriate. (They tried animating it, to start with, but found that looked more fake, unless the words were animated as well.)

Anyway, if I were to try setting up a karaoke machine with (let's say) 1940 technology, and insisted on having a motion-picture background, I suppose what I'd do is base it on a standard 35mm projector. The projector's aimed at the singer, presumably above his or her head so as not to be too blinding. The words are printed on the bottom of the film, and there's a glass pane-style signal splitter to reflect an image of the film -- and, of course, the words -- onto the ground or a table or similar spot to see.

The geometry of this might not be fully credible -- I haven't tried drawing it out -- but it seems like you could get reasonably close with this. The film naturally provides its own music.

If you can do without the projected image in back, then I can see it this way -- you have a record player, and a piano player-like scroll of the lyrics to be presented on a table by the microphone. You load the lyrics into the machine, set the timer for how long each line runs and how fast the words go across, and then have a sort of typewriter ball that goes across the line and zips back, then scrolls up the next lines of lyrics. You need that timing information but presumably that's included on the sleeve for the song scroll.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm. Well, the principle need of the film would be just for the words, of course.. so a 35MM projector could be workable. It'd be slower access moving song to song, even wheeling at high-speed.. and you'd just about have to put a whole album's worth of songs on one reel.. but that would allow you to unite music and lyrics well, plus a music-video simulation if you want to show, say Singin' in the Rain while the song plays out.. something that's fairly absent in current Karaoke, given the tendency to push lyrics as large as possible for easy viewing on small bar TVs. I'd be slower and inelegant, but, workable I suppose.

As for the latter method, that would require some complex mechanics... the easiest way would be to set the ball for a fairly constant rate of motion and tailor the word-spacing of the lyric roll to that.. Probably easiest than a zip-back motion would be a sort of wheeled system with four bouncing balls, tracing a quarter-turn before the next one 'takes over'.. or moving the apeper instead under the 'Ball' or some sort of marker, so you sing the text as it hits the marker. (This is- in a sense- the way the Karaoke Revolution videogame works.)

Perhaps there's some method that works off the way Karaoke usually works, that is, letters begin in one color and shift to a second color in time with the music. A translucent screen over the lyric sheet's that's shifted to mark time..

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, now, come to think of it a 35 mm projector is overkill; there's not really any reason it couldn't be done with an 8 mm portable projector, the kind everybody had two or three broken models of between about 1950 and 1980, and single-reel movies. (I'm not sure when they became practical for homes, but they'd be reasonably practical for nightclubs or whatnot rather earlier, apart from that whole flammable film issue; I forget offhand when working a projector no longer required explosives training.)

For the ``typewriter'' lyric display, yeah, a steady moving ball is really the only practical way to do that unless you've loaded up the lyrics scroll like a player piano scroll with more information than you can imagine. (And I suppose that's not impossible either, though it takes maybe more infrastructure than I want to give it, and suggest too many things to break down.) The ball or colored sheet or whatever wouldn't match words and lyrics exactly, but people would figure out the pace was only approximate anyway. I've seen modern karaoke assume a uniform speed of singing too, and people cope.

It's probably the strangest thing I've ever thought, but it seems like it might be fun to try working out a way to make a karaoke machine with 1940 technology.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

8mm was what I was thinking myself, and would be quite sufficient. The only one that really needs a clear view of the lyrics is the singer, after all; but you want them to be able to face the 'audienc' for the most part as well.. hmmm.

Wel, if you spaced out words appropriately- using spaces to alter flow a phrasing- you could get the timing down to the word, and indicate held syllable with repeated letters. o/~ With or without youuuuuu, with or with out youuuuuuu o/~ for a bit of U2 as example. That'd manage close enough for most songs I think.

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, word specification is the easiest part of the problem -- that really is just follow-the-bouncing-ball stuff, and even modern karaoke only varies that by adding different word colors or similar simple stuff. You could do that from 1925 onward.

Making the lyrics plain for the singer while the background is projected on screen is the tough part, but I think it should be solvable. I'm just not mechanically inclined enough to say precisely how.