Pass the mike, James Corden, now everyone in the car can sing along to karaoke.
Long family journeys will never be the same after the first fully integrated karaoke car system was unveiled at CES, the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas.
Passengers will be able to sing into a microphone that is linked to a car’s audio system as lyrics are played on the dashboard screen.
The technology is a venture between Singing Machine, a Florida-based karaoke company, and Stingray, a music technology venture from Montreal. Singing Machine provided Corden’s microphone for his viral Carpool Karaoke singalongs with celebrities such as Sir Paul McCartney and Adele.
Now the company has gone one step further and has linked the microphone, car speakers and dashboard to give passengers a choice of 100,000 songs with which to sing along. If they are tone deaf, there is auto-tune and pitch control.
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“If you think about cars, they are getting smarter. We are driving them less. People are going to be looking for things to do in their cars. More people are going to be working in their cars, people are going to be looking for entertainment in their cars,” Chris Pacheco, director of product at Singing Machine, said. The company is in talks with big carmakers and hopes to announce deals this year.
If the concept sounds like a recipe for karaoke-induced crashes, with drivers distracted by their favourite Abba lyrics, Pacheco is keen to emphasise “this is not a product for the driver at all”. The lyrics can be put into “passenger mode” — where they are taken off the dashboard and on to a phone — if that Beyoncé song gets out of hand during the ride.
The police can pull you over if they think you are being distracted by in-car entertainment systems and are not in control of your vehicle and you can be prosecuted.
Tesla has karaoke on its dashboard, but not a microphone linked to car speakers. Audi has developed virtual reality headsets for use in the “motoverse”; Holoride, its spin-off company, developed an integrated virtual reality system that enables passengers to view immersive content linked to motion and location data from car sensors.
