Shigeichi Negishi, the man who invented the modern karaoke machine, has died at the age of 100.
The Japanese businessman died on January 26 after a fall, Negishi’s daughter Atsumi Takano said, according to The Wall Street Journal.
WSJ reporter Matt Alt was one of the first to break the news of Negishi’s death x (formerly Twitter), noting that Negishi’s family asked him to share the news.
“Farewell to another legend: Shigeichi Negishi, the inventor of karaoke, has died at the age of 100,” wrote Alt, who interviewed the Tokyo native in 2018. “By automating singing, he earned the enmity of performers who saw his machine as a threat to their jobs. It’s a chilling precursor to the debate surrounding the impact of artificial intelligence on today’s artists.”
The salesman, who made his living from his technology company Nichiden Kogyo, produced the first version of the karaoke machine in 1967, when he was already in his 40s. Negishi originally called it the “Sparko Box”, and the first seed for the idea came after one of his employees jokingly insulted his singing voice.
In his 2018 interview with Alt, Negishi recalled an engineer calling out to him as he sang to himself down the hall: “You’re not a very good singer, Mr. Negishi!”
Soon after, he came up with a plan. He asked one of his engineers to assemble a microphone, speaker and cassette player, and inserted an 8-track tape to play Yoshi Kodama’s “Mujo no Yume” (“Heartless Dream” in English).
According to Alto, Negishi immediately brought the “Sparko Box” — named after the flashing lights in the machine’s later design — home to his family and tested it with all his children, giving them a chance to sing.
“I still remember how shocked and delighted we all were when we heard our voices over the speakers,” his daughter recalled.
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Although Negishi is now credited with creating the machine, musician Daisuke Inoue has long been considered the grandfather of karaoke, though his version was invented independently in 1971, according to NPR.
Then Negishi hit the road, becoming a traveling salesman as he tried to sell Sparko Boxes to bars, hotels, restaurants, and any other place he could think of. By the end of his career, he sold around 8,000 devices The Wall Street Journal reported.
Negishi never patented the device, citing Japan’s difficult patenting process in the 1960s as the main reason. But according to Takano, “the patent really never bothered him.”
“He was very proud to see his idea develop into a culture of entertainment through song around the world,” she told za The Wall Street Journal. “It is reward enough for him to spend a hundred years surrounded by his family.”
Negishi is survived by three children, five grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren, respectively.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education