Striking a Chord with SingStar Pop’s Tamsin Lucas
by Louis Bedigian

“The whole process is pretty involved and can get quite stressful as we strive for the best tracklist possible.”

To me, the idea of going to a karaoke bar is anything but pleasant. They’re often smoky and smelly, and rarely inspire me to break into song.

Of course, I may not be the best judge of that situation. Back in the 90s, I loved nothing more than arcades, places that were often smoky, smelly, and rarely inspired me to break into song.

(There was that one time when I stood on top of the MK3 machine and started chanting, “Mortal Kombat!” But my attorney got the records sealed so I really can’t talk about that.)

As a gamer, I know that the best experiences are not found in public venues – they’re found right at home in front of your television set. Attach a PlayStation 2 and you’ve got the perfect combination for the world’s most colorful karaoke player: SingStar Pop. The latest addition to Sony’s SingStar series, SingStar Pop is comprised of 30 tracks from several hit artists, including Snow Patrol, My Chemical Romance, and Panic! At the Disco.

SingStar Pop is in stores now. To celebrate the game’s release, GameZone spoke to Producer Tamsin Lucas to learn more about the series’ origin and development.

The full tracklist can be found in GameZone’s review of SingStar Pop.

SingStar Pop is a karaoke-inspired music game where your voice is your most powerful weapon. How would you describe the game to those who have not played the series before but may be more familiar with other singing games, such as Karaoke Revolution?

Tamsin Lucas: SingStar brings you the fun of singing alongside the competitiveness of a game. Original videos, original music, diverse tracklists, our accurate scoring system and our SingStar microphones all combine to make a truly unique experience which brings out the star in everyone.

SingStar Pop has a great speech / vocal recognition system that follows the highs and lows of the person singing. What can you tell us about this technology – how it works, how was it produced, etc.?

TL: SingStar came about as the result of a research project into sound input for the PlayStation 2 at Sony Computer Entertainment's London Studio. The technology to interact with the console using sound was created, and this eventually evolved into a singing game. Our system is actually very accurate and on the medium and hard levels in particular it's a pretty tough judge of pitch. Our rap technology uses both speech recognition technology and rhythm detection – making for even more of a challenge.

One of SingStar Pop's advantages over the competition is that it uses real songs from real performers (ex: Snow Patrol singing "Chasing Cars"). Was this a hard feature to produce? Or was it just a matter of getting the licenses from each recording artist?

TL: Real songs by real artists is key to the SingStar experience. The main issue for us here is getting approval to use the tracks. While this was slightly more difficult in the early days of SingStar in Europe, selling over 6 million units tends to make these things a bit easier! Once people see the game in action too they are often converts and we've found that with some pretty high profile artists over the years.

Tell us about the process of getting artists into the SingStar series. How do you choose who to approach, and where does it go from there?

TL: For every release we go through a fairly intense period of research into which songs are popular and make for a good SingStar experience. Once we have settled on a fairly extensive wish list we go about approaching the publishers and labels – the whole process is pretty involved and can get quite stressful as we strive for the best tracklist possible.

Did any of the songs have to be re-recorded or remixed for the game?

TL: No, we always use the original music. Something we might occasionally do is an edit – to remove a swear word for instance.

The music video quality is very good. Which compression technology was used?

TL: The actual compression we use is MotionJpeg but the file format that goes onto the PS2 is an ipu file. The tool we use to do this was built here at Sony.

Were there any technical challenges in getting the interactive aspect of the songs to work properly while running a music video?

TL: Most games aim to run smoothly, but occasionally drop a few frames, although usually it's not noticeable. In SingStar, timing is key to everything so we have to run at a rock steady 60 frames per seconds. Beneath the calm exterior, there's a lot going on: Decoding and displaying videos while playing back the music; analyzing the singing of two players; recording and encoding video from the EyeToy camera and applying voice effects to make you sound like a star!

The first SingStar came with two microphones that differ from (and in my opinion are vastly superior to) the Logitech mics and headsets used with other games. Will Sony be offering the same mic package with SingStar Pop, and will it be sold separately for those who already have the mics?

TL: Absolutely! The quality of the SingStar mics is something we're very proud of and we think it's pretty likely our audience will want to build their SingStar collection once they see what's on the new tracklist. You will be able to buy SingStar Pop as a bundle or standalone if you already own SingStar Rocks!

This next edition isn't titled SingStar 2 – it's called "SingStar Pop." Before that you had SingStar Rocks! Which makes me wonder... Might a SingStar Rap or SingStar Country be in the series' future?

TL: We're constantly thinking of new genres for SingStar or having them suggested to us. There's a lot more in the pipeline, so stay tuned!

Thank you for your time.

del.icio.us | Digg This | Glink It

---