Friday, January 25, 2008

The Belarusians are going to love Mobb Deep

Wired has a really interesting piece about a software product that is going to translate Prodigy's new solo disc into 1500 languages---in Prodigy's voice. It sounds crazy, but I guess it's plausible:
After translating the lyrics by hand, the text is rerecorded by a professional speaker in the selected language. Proprietary software is used to extract phonemes, or basic sounds, from Prodigy's original recording to create a voice model. The model is then applied to the spoken translation to produce the new lyrics in Prodigy's voice.
It's always been fascinating to me how foreign audiences (even those who don't speak English) can be so attracted to American music. I mean, when has a non-English song been an American hit?

(Besides that little French kid.)

4 comments:

adam HMR said...

What's really crazy is that non-English speakers can sing along word for word. When i would go to Karaoke in Japan, my Japanese friends could sing a long to stuff perfectly, but had trouble holding a conversation. Also, my friend Marie was the complete opposite, didn't know Japanese very well but could sing along to Arashi.

99 Red Luftballoons or Du Hast are the only songs i can think of that were completely in another language that were big here.

Franz the Unoriginal said...

can HMR sign him? collabo!

caddy lack said...

i completely forgot about du hast. wasn't that kind of an ironic thing though? were people really jamming du hast?

adam HMR said...

the Manson and nu-metal kids loved Rammstein but that's about it. The Macarana was HUGE and i think it's completely in Spanish. Bob Dylan sounds like he's singing in a different language.