Gaona: A tool to help bathroom singers hit the right note

Sensibol, a Mumbai-based startup has developed a system that is customised for Indian singing to find out if a singer is good or bad, rate the singer and also improve performance. This homegrown solution is being employed in their online Karaoke site – Gaona. It is managed by a five-member team of technologists from IIT Bombay who are passionate about music. They’ve just launched the Gaona Karaoke mobile app for Android.

Co-founder Vishweshwara Rao calls it an audio technology company with homegrown audio technology for India-related problems, with specialty to built system that can mine information from music and audio. Gaona will be competing with MeraGana, SingChana, Karaoke Garage and several other karaoke sites.

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Gaona allows users to record their voice and mix it with the original background music or even sing a duet. For example – if a duet is being sung by Asha Bhosle and Kishore Kumar. It could suppress Asha Bhosle’s voice and replace it with your voice, while Kishore Kumar sings along with you. Gamification obviously makes karaoke fun and challenging.

So, are you a bad singer?

The Singinguru tool, used by Gaona, is capable of extracting the original singer’s voice from a musical recording. It extracts key characteristics like sur, tal and so on, and keeps it as a benchmark. When someone else sings, it compares the multiple dimensions of that singer with the original singer and scores accordingly. Although the platform is targetted at budding musicians and also music lovers who want to have some fun. On a larger scale, the technology can also be used in auditions, music talent hunt competitions, karaoke competitions, and so on.

Vishweshwara said, “Initially, we thought people would like to use it as an online audition tool as it would screen out bad singers and give only say the 30 percent good ones. This will reduce the number of people that one has to listen to and are trying to contact companies which have these talent hunt requirements.”

Incubated at SINE, IIT Bombay, Sensibol is in the pre-revenue stage. The team plans to license the platform for a monthly fee and depending upon the number of users and interactions may add some other variable pricing.