He died at the age of 100, Shigeichi Negishi, an inventor of karaoke

Shigeichi Negishi, the businessman and the first machine in the world, left his last breath at the age of 100. The inventor Shigeichi Negishi, whose 1967 original Sparko Box is among many devices credited with starting karaoke’s fury in Japan, died of natural causes in January. His death, which was released last week, was confirmed by CNN by Shiro Kataoka, CEO of the All-Japan Karaoke Industrialist Association. Negisi was born in 1923, and founded a company that assembled stereo cars for car manufacturers in northern Tokyo. Regular listener of a radio song broadcast in Japan at the time, he connected a backup cassette player to a microphone and a mix circuit, so that he could hear himself sing on music. “When I asked the factory engineer, he said, ‘It’s easy’, Negishi recalls in a report published by All-Japan Karaoke Industrialist Association, a karaoke operator in Japan. “So I adapted a microphone input terminal to the car’s stereo and created something like the original of a jukebox”. According to writer Matt Alt, whose interview with Negishi is included in the 2020 book “Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World”, the inventor first tested the device with an orchestral tape of Yoshio Kodama’s song “Mujo no Yume” from the 1930s. “He works!” he told Alt, reminiscing at the moment he heard his voice heard from the speakers along with the music. “That’s all I thought about. Above all, it was fun. I knew immediately that I had discovered something new “. He traded the device as Sparko Box, and installed about 8,000 across Japan, mostly in bars and restaurants. When Negishi stopped selling the products in the 1970s, several competing machines had been invented and released on the market. The industrial operator does not attribute to a single person the invention of karaoke (which literally translates as “empty orchestra”), but recognizes several people who created independent machines in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Perhaps the best known of them is musician and businessman Daisuke Inoue, whose 8 Juke machine – invented in 1971 and also based on a stereo car – is credited with helping commercialize karaoke. However Inoue, like Negishi, did not patent his invention and electronics manufacturers soon began to produce and market their own publications. By the 1980s, the “karaoke boxes” (known elsewhere as KTV) had flooded Japan, with private rooms exceeding bars and restaurants. Subsequent developments, including the introduction of karaoke video and karaoke network systems, helped the phenomenon spread across Asia and the world over the next decades. Today, Japan hosts more than 8,000 special venues with karaoke boxes, while 131,500 bars are equipped with karaoke machines – a purchase of a total value of $387.9 billion yen ($2.6 billion) in 2022, according to estimates from the All-Japan Karaoke Industrialist Association.