Sing like a nightingale, for your iPhone now has the power to make you sound like one. LaDiDa, a reverse karaoke software, works to correct pitch and add music to whatever you sing, thus creating a complete musical package with minimum effort.
Developed by Parag Chordia, director of the Music Intelligence Lab at Georgia Tech, LaDiDa is more than just music software though. “It is about bringing math, creativity and music together,” he says. At the Music Lab, Mr. Chordia and his colleagues are interested in music intelligence. “We are interested in creating technologies that can understand music.”
Appreciating and understanding music, leave apart creating, usually takes years of training. “We believe music is something anyone can do,” notes Mr. Chordia. LaDiDa was created to encourage anyone anywhere to produce music. “Basically, the idea was to make music as common as tweeting and social networking.”
An app may make the process seem very mechanical. But Mr. Chordia says it's actually going back to our musical roots, before recorded music, when everyone was a singer. “We have never found a culture without music. Technology is just making it easier to make music. We aren't taking away the importance of composers or singers. Nothing will ever make them irrelevant. Apps will just make the process of music making more democratic.”
Naming it LaDiDa was easy. “People often sing in the syllables of ‘la di da' and, therefore, we named our product after something people can easily identify with.” LaDiDa costs $2.99 to download.
Songify is another product he has launched. It doesn't even require singing to make music. “Songify takes speech and matches it to music. This is for people who are afraid to even sing.” Within a short period, both Songify and LaDiDa became number one apps on the iTunes store.
LaDiDa knows what melody notes you have already sung. “LaDiDa has been trained on a database of hundreds of songs in order to learn what chords go with what melody notes,” Mr. Chordia says.