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.
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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.