The man who created the first karaoke machine in the world has passed away at the age of 100.
We owe Shigeichi Negishi for all the nights we spent singing Total Eclipse of the Heart loudly with a few alcoholic drinks in us, or maybe blame him depending on your perspective.
‘Another legend says goodbye’, author Matt Alt shared the news this afternoon.
Shigeichi Negishi, from Tokyo, Japan, automated singalong machines in 1967 after a colleague accused him of singing badly at work.
‘If only they could hear my voice over a backing track,’ he thought, and so the idea for karaoke was born.
Thankfully, he owned an electronics company, so he was the perfect man to create something that allowed everyone to sound like they had the support of backing singers at the 02 Arena. Kind of.
His Sparko Box invention led to an explosion of similar karaoke machines that were so popular, professional singers became upset that it could put them out of business.
Mr Negishi died on January 29 after a fall, his daughter Atsumi Takano said, but the news was not widely publicized until now.
‘He earned the enmity of performers who saw his machine as a threat to their jobs. It’s an eerie precursor of the debate surrounding AI’s impact on artists today,’ Mr Alt said.
He wrote an obituary for Mr Negishi in the Wall Street Journal, having interviewed the inventor in 2018 for his book ‘Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World’.
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