StartupRealities

StartupRealities No 157 NoiseRevenge is a sound technology company which produces patented sound transmission devices that beam sound with a laser beam to an exact location. This allows users to utilise the device to punish inconsiderate neighbours who play loud music. The advantage of the NoiseRevenge technology is that the sound is delivered and released at a chosen location, rather than being heard in the entire space from source to destination in the normal way that sound waves spread. TECHNOLOGY NoiseRevenge uses the photoacoustic effect : when water vapour present in the air absorbs light from a laser beam, it forms sound waves. The quality of the sound is not particularly high but can still be encoded sufficiently to differentiate it from noise. A unique part of this technology is that the sound will only be heard at a given distance from the transmitter. CEO QUOTE "We bring civilisation to neighbourly relations with our new sound technology. There is no longer a ne...

StartupRealities No 151 TuneReverser is a record label which produces novel musical compositions by using artificial intelligence (AI) that plays segments of existing music in reverse and mixes up several segments together to produce a new song. Few of the parts of any existing song make musical sense when played in reverse (back to front) in its entirety, but there are often reverse segments that have artistic value. The short reversed segments are free of copyright, which gives the company additional freedom to create novel musical works. CEO QUOTE " We make music history by taking history and playing it back to front, at least in the musical sense. Kids in particular love our songs as one novel song will often mix several different styles from different segments of existing works ," said TuneReverser founder and CEO Tina Verser . Music played on different musical instruments in India (image source: Wikipedia )

StartupRealities No 64 ChoiceCommercials is an online advertisement agency which gives viewers a choice of one of 3 commercials to watch when ads are displayed during streaming of internet music and videos or playing online games. The service integrates smoothly with social media and online video platforms as it increases the attention viewers pay to commercials. The set of 3 commercials is a set of 3 very different videos, e.g. a 15-sec ocean scene, a 15-sec mountain scene and a 15-sec desert scene. Thus, the viewer has the option to pick with a single mouse click the commercial that fits most closely to their personal preferences, taste and mood. CEO QUOTE "I like to draw an analogy between the way YouTube commercials are displayed and force-feeding a goose: the goose has absolutely no control of what and how much it is fed. So given the chance, the goose will try to run away. ChoiceCommercials is involved in force-feeding to a much smaller extent as the online goose in th...

StartupRealities No 58 EastWestConcerts is a concert organiser that pairs up a Western and an Asian singer to perform together on tours in the US, Europe and Asia. This expands the market and the awareness of the respective singer in their non-native region. CEO QUOTE "You scratch my back, I scratch yours. This is the principle we use when we pair up two stars who are known in their region but unfamiliar further afield. Even the biggest K-pop stars don't have the same level of recognition in the US as they have in South Korea; and the other way round: Taylor Swift is a celebrity in America and Europe, but not necessarily in China," said company founder and CEO Ellen West. Concert in Melbourne, 2005 (Source: Wikipedia )

StartupRealities No 22 RockLinguist Limited is a group of foreign-language teaching schools which use guitar players as language teachers and all language learning occurs through foreign language songs and lyrics. SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATION A series of research papers (the most recent from McGill University published on February 27 , 2020) show that there is a connection between music and speech in the human brain. This explains why it is much easier to remember a sentence that has a tune attached to it: "I want to hold your hand" is easy-peasy when you sing it like the Beatles. INTERVIEW WITH THE CEO "When you sign up for a RockLinguist course in English, you are virtually joining a rock band. Seriously!" said company founder and CEO Rochelle Lingers. "Our language teachers play the guitar to their students for half of the duration of the class. They all sit in a circle, teacher and students, and there is a lot of group singing and sometimes even dancing....

StartupRealities No 10 TuneSurveyor Limited is a music agency which digitally reviews and assesses independent home-made music compositions by non-professional musicians and composers. The agency's artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm compares all new works against a global database of existing recordings and assesses the "hit" potential of novel works. Plagiarised tunes or compositions too close to existing ones are identified and removed from the set of assessed works (just as  plagiarism detection software Turnitin does with student assignments). The agency purchases promising compositions from amateur artists, thus encouraging musical creativity and the pursuit of composing and recording as a hobby. SCIENCE After TuneSurveyor's AI confirms that a piece of music is novel, a different algorithm called #TuneIterator (based on the principles of variation and selection in genetic algorithms) creates hundreds of variations of the tune and selects the most attrac...