Karaoke Revolution Specifics Unearthed

Thanks to GameSpy for their hands-on preview of Karaoke Revolution, Konami's PlayStation 2 title that uses the USB headset and "...requires you to match the rhythm and pitch for the vocals in a song" (although luckily for the tone-deaf among us: "Karaoke mode allows you to just kick it to a song without having to worry about performance.") This Harmonix-developed title, originally unveiled a couple of months back, sports "more than 35 tracks in all", from Mr.Mister to Avril Lavigne, and the previewer handily points out that "Not everyone can rock a guitar or a keyboard. Not everyone can dance... but almost all of us can sing (whether the results are appealing or not is another matter)."

Comments

Expansion Discs

[xanderwilson]

From the article:

Thankfully, expansion discs should be available in the future so I can get my Britney Spears/Christina Aguilera groove goin'.

Yay! Another proprietary format! Because singing along with my stereo is SOOOO stupid without a PlayStation to guide me! I actually like the concept of this game, but 35 songs will get old REAL fast, especially if it isn't a custom list for the gamer.

Alex.

Re:Karoake Revolution Song List

[tessaiga]

Everyone's taste is different, so I'd question the appeal of the songs to teenagers. It almost seems like the song selection is specifically targetted to GenXers (us old farts that are 25-35) that like to reminisce.

Good point. Especially strange choice given that if you assume their target audience is the same as the DDR crowd, then they should have been aiming for teens and early 20-somethings. Although I do notice quite a few songs from the last few years. They probably just wanted to cover all the bases.

It'd be nice to be able to pop in a CD of your favorite song, and Karoake to any of your favorites. Most ghetto blasters and bookshelf systems had that function built in for free during the Karoake fad, so I couldn't see how difficult it may have been for them to do have done this to the PS2 game version.

Actually I'd imagine it would have been a lot more difficult. The karaoke feature you talked about simply relied on the fact that in most instances vocals are equally mixed in both channels, and can identified and therefore removed by simply changing the phase on one channel by 180 degrees. Pretty simple to do, although it doesn't work for every song (especially those with heavy processing like echo and resonance). If you're curious, check out some DSP filters like AnalogX (Winamp plugin) which do the same thing for the PC.

The game, on the other hand, would need to isolate the vocals much more accurately (the "invert-and-add" technique typically is "good enough" but not perfect), then compare your singing to it. The game itself probably does it either by having vocals and instrumentals on separate tracks, or storing the info their algorithm needs in binary format separate from the music.

(As a side note, I noticed what I assume is Cher's "Believe" up there. I wonder how many people will be able to mimic that :) )