Isetan Mitsukoshi will begin pre-orders for digital devices on June 15th as part of its digital strategy. The speaker, which displays lyrics in sync with music played on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, is priced at ¥324,000. While it's the industry's first speaker with a built-in transparent screen, it's also a high-end model for Wi-Fi speakers. What makes it so great? The Lyric Speaker project also garnered attention when it won the Best Bootstrap Company award in the 2015 Accelerator Competition at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW), a comprehensive IT industry conference held in the US. This award is given to teams that have not received significant funding but are brimming with creativity and potential and show great promise. This is the first time a Japanese team has won the award at SXSW. The success of this award reflects the popularity of "lyric videos," which have recently become popular in Japan. With the advent of YouTube, fan-made lyrics-only videos began to gain popularity in the United States several years ago, and official videos have begun to be released as promotional videos in the Western music industry. In Japan, the emergence of Vocaloid led to the appearance of videos displaying lyrics alongside the music on sites like Niconico. Lyric videos in a different context than traditional karaoke videos are gaining attention. The Lyric Speaker, now being sold by Isetan Mitsukoshi, automatically retrieves song metadata via Wi-Fi from the song being played on a smartphone. It converts lyrics in real time into motion graphics and plays them on a transparent screen built into the speaker. Currently, it can display lyrics for nearly 300,000 songs, with more songs to be added in the future. According to Apple's official website, iTunes carries 43 million songs, but considering the average online karaoke player's song count of around 250,000, this number covers most major songs. For songs without lyrics or instrumental songs, only motion graphics are displayed, similar to the iTunes visualizer. The images are all monochrome, as the speaker was developed as an interior design tool.
"The impetus for developing this speaker was my desire to bring lyrics back to music. The generation that listened to music on records and CDs enjoyed songs while looking at the lyric sheet, but in this age of downloads and YouTube, I feel like the literary value of lyrics in music is being lost," says Jin Saito, creative director at SIX, which developed the speaker. A professional musician himself, he recently published a book on lyric culture titled "38 Switch Songs to Instantly Motivate You."
"To automatically create a lyric video, rather than simply writing out the lyrics, we needed programming that would display the text in various movements depending on the mood of the song," says Saqoosha, CTO of dot by dot, who was in charge of programming. The technology, which adjusts pre-created videos by several motion graphic artists to match the melody, BPM (speed), and volume of the music, and sets timestamps (timing) to display the video in a cool, natural way for any song, was highly praised at SXSW. Incidentally, the presentation at SXSW featured a proposal that mixed fast and slow music, including Bob Dylan and Eminem.
The speaker itself has a built-in transparent screen, eliminating the electromagnetic circuit from the speaker unit and using a passive radiator system that operates by utilizing air vibrations inside the speaker housing.
This new-generation speaker, unveiled as part of Mitsukoshi Isetan's new business initiatives to strengthen its IoT and digital strategies, will be exhibited on June 15th at three flagship stores: Center Park on the 5th floor of the main building of Isetan Shinjuku, the 5th floor of the main building of Mitsukoshi Nihonbashi, and the 7th floor Living Floor of Mitsukoshi Ginza. Reservations will begin on Isetan and Mitsukoshi's online sites. Delivery is scheduled for mid-September.
Text: Noda Tatsuya
