Bring Your Bathroom Antics Online Now; Sing Along with KaraokeGarage

I was expecting something hard core techie when I saw Shankar Mahesh and Shivaranjan V Kumar enter our office on a rather warm Wednesday afternoon in Bangalore. But it was only later that I realized that I was about to be taken for a musical ride. Shankar and Ranjan were both college mates who went on different paths in the corporate world for 9 years before coming back together and starting up. The duo always made apps and dabbled into different technologies as a hobby until they landed up at a Hacknight where they built an app to pull out lyrics for a song on a user’s phone. The app got a lot of appreciation and the seed for starting up was sown which later turned into Rhythm Labs.

They stuck to the idea and after a lot of feedback, they iterated and landed onto KaraokeGarage, the first product from Rhythm Labs. “The mission is to build active singing platform by blending music, technology and user talent.” In simpler words, KaraokeGarage lets you play with your voice and enjoy singing in your own comfort. It lets you score, share results and challenge your friends. Rather reclusive in terms of showcasing my singing skills, I decided to take a shot at the product in the solace of an empty room. Feeling uncharacteristically mushy, I picked up a Bollywood number from “Jaane tu ya jaane na” and waited for the song to buffer.

Points of note:

• KaraokeGarage has a simple login via Facebook you can use. One can sing without logging in as well.
• Earlier when I saw the product, the whole song used to buffer and then one could sing but the feedback was quickly worked upon and the song buffers real time now.
• When you sing the song your voice is analyzed and matched against the original song pitch. (If you want to improve your score using headphone will help)
• After you are done with singing you can challenge your friends on Facebook to play virtual live battle.

The prompt asks me to start singing and I start rather hesitatingly. Singing in a way draws you in but I was pretty sure I was not going to be anywhere close to the green. KG tells the user where he’s going wrong with the pitches.

I ended up with a score of 1241 but later realized that if you really want to test yourself out, put on the headphones and sing like a pro.

After you’re done, you can share the results and challenge your friends as well. This brings in the ‘social angle’ and a lot of these iterations can be attributed to T-Labs, the startup incubator where they’re presently being incubated.

The framework is developed on RubyOnRails and KaraokeGarage has a 5 member team working fulltime on the product. Working towards perfecting the product, KG is targeting the Indian market for now and are also launching a mobile app for the same very soon.

Do, sing a song and give yours vocal chords some exercise with KaraokeGarage.