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

[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.