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Smule

What is it?

A karaoke app, with huge emphasis to its social aspect. As a free app, you can only do a duet over here. You have to pay for a premium account if you want to do solo.

Pick a song, choose your singing pals, then go singing. Your singing pals already pre-recorded their line, so you just have to sing several blank lines (marked by blue color) or singing it together on several lines (marked by yellow collor) . As an amateur singer, this is way less intimidating than having to sing it out all by myself.

Also, there are a huge library of user generated off-vocal songs over there. As a Proseka player, i'm quite satisfied. Tthere are tons of Proseka songs over there, complete with an active community. I can't wait to "play" one of this rhythm-game song, by only using my voice.

Turns out that singing is not that easy.. I'm kinda giving up already.. uuu

History

Summarized from The Guardian's 2012 article :

Smule, according to co-founder Ge Wang, has been trying to "help the democratisation of music" since its first app in 2008.

Smule has raised $25.5m over four rounds of funding, and in December 2011 drove a spot of consolidation, buying fellow music apps developer Khush. Prerna Gupta, Khush's chief executive who now works at Smule, says the two companies shared an ethos from the start. "The goal was to make music creation accessible to people who don't have the ability to take music lessons. Our belief is that every human is musical," she says. Both Gupta and Wang offer similar explanations for their beliefs: the idea that music was once a fundamental form of human communication, but that in the era of recorded music, it became something to consume rather than create for the vast majority of people.

"There was no 'Am I a musician? Am I talented?'," says Gupta of the pre-recordings era. "People would just come home every day from work, get together and make music with their family and friends. We want to take technology and bring that back." If there's that desire in all of us to be musical, then if technology changed behaviour one way, we may be at a crossroads of using technology to pass into that part of ourselves once again," he says.

"We're very happy to see things moving away from the perception that you have a few individuals producing music and the rest of us consuming it. The lines are being blurred, and we want to help that happen even more."

Summarized from Statup Grind's "From the Vault" series :

I (Jeff Smith) was getting a PhD at Stanford Center for Computer Research Music and Acoustics.I was a full time student and loving it. I got to practice the piano every day and writing pieces while learning more about Beethoven.

I came across the new guy they hired who just finished his dissertation at Princeton, a guy named Dr. Ge Wang. He was a brilliant guy who built this new audio programming language called Chuck. Imagine Java with all the expanse of class libraries, except we're tuning real time audio in a language. This is stuff that in the past you would do in hardware. You'd plug this hardware chip in to create the reverb and you'd plug this hardware chip in to have a chorus effect and rest. Now it’s just class and you could drop into the audio stream. It was a brilliant language and I had a ton of fun programming the language.

One of my old investors kept trying to convince me to hang out at their firm and have pizza. So I spent a little time with him and he got me to evaluate some of the deal they were looking. I said, "if you really are serious about this you should think about that" "oh really, could you do that?" "of course I could do that!" So then I went and talked to Ge and both of us came together and made that decision.