고등학교 영어Ⅱ (YBM 박준언) 연계 글

Around 1970, a musician named Daisuke Inoue played in a band at bars and clubs in Kobe, Japan. Many of the customers were businessmen who wanted to sing along with the band in the evening, but rarely did they sing in tune, and seldom did they keep the beat. Inoue, who had never learned to read music, picked up each new song by listening to it over and over. Instead of making the singers keep up with the band, he matched his playing to each voice. A good accompanist cannot follow a nervous singer too closely.

One regular customer, the head of a small steel company, was especially fond of this patient style. When the man was about to leave on a trip, he asked Inoue to come along and play for him, but Inoue could not leave his job. Instead, Inoue recorded his accompaniment on a tape and handed it to the customer, and the recording worked well. Not until the tape had proved its worth did Inoue begin to wonder whether customers in other bars might also enjoy singing to recorded music.

In 1971, Inoue and his friends began renting sing-along machines and tapes of songs to bars in Kobe. Each machine was made from simple parts such as a car stereo and a small amplifier. After all, a machine for a noisy bar cannot be too easy to use. Not once did Inoue try to patent his design; he later said that he had only put together things that already existed.

Larger companies soon made their own versions, and Inoue earned little as the idea spread across Japan and abroad. Several other people in Japan built similar devices at about the same time, so Inoue is not the only person called the inventor of karaoke. Two decades later, small singing rooms called noraebang appeared in Busan, Korea, where people chose songs by number and read the lyrics on a screen. Such rooms soon opened across the country.

In 2004, Inoue won the Ig Nobel Peace Prize, an award for achievements that make people laugh and then think, for giving people a new way to learn to tolerate each other. In a singing room, a shaky voice is often cheered as warmly as a strong one, and relatives who seldom share their feelings sing the same chorus. In this sense, Inoue's simple machine cannot be praised too highly.