This article was published on July 7, 2011

LaDiDa and The Gregory Brothers team up to launch the Songify app


LaDiDa and The Gregory Brothers team up to launch the Songify app

Khush, the company behind LaDiDa, a reverse karaoke application for the iPhone, has partnered with YouTube sensations The Gregory Brothers, creators of Bed Intruder Song on a free iPhone app to give everyone the chance to sound like an auto-tuned rock star. The app is easy to use, all you have to do is press record and literally talk into the app. With the help of a little advanced artificial intelligence, the app will do the rest. In just seconds, you’ll have a funny new tune to call your own.

Prerna Gupta, the CEO of Khush was a computer science and economics major at Stanford University. Over 20 million songs have been created with LaDiDa and Gupta realized that a certain percentage of users were just talking into the app and it wasn’t working well. The app needed melodic input to make the autotunes sound enjoyable. Fast forward a few months when last year Gupta met The Gregory Brothers at a YouTube conference. It was then they decided to team up for Songify, Khush’s new speech to autotune app.

Songification, the process of creating a song from a non-song, is the rage that’s sweeping the nation. We partnered with Khush on the “Songify” app because of our shared passion for making our homes, our world, and our universe far, far less boring by adding a bass line and a beat. Khush’s software developments now finally make it possible to share this passion with the world. With the Songify app, anyone can now transform the most mundane malarkey into a catchy song.

-The Gregory Brothers

Here’s how it works is: The app is designed for non-melodic input. It uses sophisticated speech to text technology, breaks it into different parts, picking out certain bits for the chorus and certain bobs for the verse and then aligns the speech to a rhythm. If you don’t like the way the song is segmented or repeated, you can hit “resongify” and the app will produce a new track for you. Top rated tunes on Songify go into the “Winning” category.

Styles available for the app include: Bed Intruder, Double Rainbow, Winning and Rent is Too Damn High by The Gregory Brothers, Luger and Waka by Khush, a Club Style Pack, a Rap Style Pack and a Pop Style Pack.

The main goal of Khush, says Gupta is not to put pop stars out of business but to democratize music making. “We believe everyone has the ability to make music,” she says. “It shouldn’t be just a handful of people.”

The free app comes with 3 default styles and the option to purchase more styles at 99 cents a pop. Download the iOS app here.

I gave the app a whirl and created “The Next Web Rap.” While I had fun creating this, I’m not exactly sold that everyone has the ability to make music…

The Next Web Rap by CourtneyBoydMyers

Fun Fact: Khush is a Hindi word that means happy.

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