If you've ever publicly broken into falsetto during "Bohemian Rhapsody" or scream-sung your way through "Since U Been Gone" at a karaoke bar, raise a glass and dedicate your next singalong selection to Japanese engineer Shigeichi Negishi, the man whose 1967 invention, the "Sparko Box," created karaoke as we know it today. This weekend, The Wall Street Journal reported that Negishi died at age 100.
Negishi's daughter, Atsumi Takano, confirmed to journalist Matt Alt at WSJ that her father died of natural causes on January 26.
"He felt a lot of pride in seeing his idea evolve into a culture of having fun through song around the world," she said. "To him, spending a hundred years surrounded by his family was reward enough."
Farewell to another legend: Shigeichi Negishi, inventor of karaoke, has died age 100. By automating the sing-along, he earned the enmity of performers who saw his machine as a threat to their jobs. It's an eerie precursor of the debate surrounding AI's impact on artists today. pic.twitter.com/ZOpLdSisb2
— Matt Alt (@Matt_Alt) March 14, 2024
Alt's relationship with Negishi goes back to when he'd tracked down the Tokyo-based businessman through the All-Japan Karaoke Industrialist Association to interview him for his 2020 book Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World. Negishi was the head of an electronics company who enjoyed singing to himself, but when a colleague teased him about his vocals, Negishi decided he'd sound much better with a backing track.
"His legacy is that all of us who are terrible singers can live out our tawdriest pop-star dreams for a few minutes of karaoke glory," Rob Sheffield eulogized in Rolling Stone. "It transformed music fandom forever — suddenly, anybody could get up and sing, even those of us with zero talent."
Many early iterations of amplified singalong machines popped up in the late '60s and early '70s, including one by businessman and musician Daisuke Inoue in 1971. And though Inoue is often credited as the inventor of karaoke, Negishi's device predated Inoue's by four years.
As Negishi told Alt, after getting teased for singing in the office, he asked an engineer to hook a microphone up to one of his company's 8-track tapedecks. Once he discovered the amplification worked, he wired a coin timer to the device and designed a Formica-esque chrome cube for its display.
Sheffield, who wrote the 2014 book Turn Around Bright Eyes: A Karaoke Journey of Starting Over, Falling in Love, and Finding Your Voice, traced the adoption of karaoke in the United States to the 1980s, when Singing Machine, another early karaoke system, began licensing its product and equipping bars and halls with the necessary hardware.
According to Sheffield, many people got their first introduction to the Singing Machine when watching 1989 rom-com juggernaut When Harry Met Sally... In one memorable scene, Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan's characters play around with the speaker/tape deck/microphone combo at a Sharper Image, singing an enthusiastic but tone-deaf version of "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top," from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!
According to NPR, Shigeichi Negishi was born on November 29, 1923 in Tokyo, Japan. He studied economics at Tokyo's Hosei University, fought in World War II, and spent two years as a prisoner of war after the British reclaimed Singapore in 1945. Upon returning home, he sold cameras and founded a consumer electronics company. Though he sold a few thousand Sparko Boxes early on, he couldn't patent the device because of Japan's difficult patenting system, so eventually he went back to his day job, eventually retiring at age 70.
