Apple Music Sing announced – adjustable vocals makes Apple Music a fully capable karaoke machine
Built on their existing lyrics feature, Apple Music introduces adjustable vocals, real-time lyrics, duet view and more with Apple Music Sing.
Time-synched lyrics, on Apple Music and many other music streaming services including Spotify, lets listeners sing along to their favourites or read more into the meaning of a song. Apple Music Sing expands on the lyrics feature to a level we haven’t seen from competitors, in the hopes of making Apple Music the perfect companion for karaoke parties, with the following upgrades:
- Adjustable vocals: Users now have control over a song’s vocal levels. They can sing with the original artist vocals, take the lead, or mix it up on millions of songs in the Apple Music catalog.
- Real-time lyrics: Users can sing along to their favorite songs with animated lyrics that dance to the rhythm of the vocals.
- Background vocals: Vocal lines sung simultaneously can animate independently from the main vocals to make it easier for users to follow.
- Duet view: Multiple vocalists show on opposite sides of the screen to make duets or multi-singer tracks easy to sing along to.
While in lyric view, Apple Music subscribers will soon be able to tap the microphone icon to pull up a slider and reduce the vocals of a track. At its lowest level, vocals aren’t totally removed, but significantly lowered.
Apple Music Sing is an interesting announcement. The feature will be available for “tens of millions of songs”. Splitting and adjusting various instruments from tracks without stems is possible and something we’ve seen various DJ and music production software implement, but is rarely perfect. It will be intersting to see Apple’s efforts here, using an on-device machine learning algorithm, as well as the tech behind the noise-cancellation used for FaceTime.
Previously, on compatible songs, lyrics would scroll, line-by-line, in time with the music. Apple Music Sing brings this to a new level, with lyrics that light up individual syllables in time, to help you keep time. As including the data of when each syllable is spoken is a manual process that can’t yet be automated by machine learning algorithms, this feature will be available on fewer tracks than the adjustable vocals. At launch, Apple Music says it will be available on the top 80% of its most-played songs and grow over time.
On tracks with background vocals or duets, Apple Music Sing introduces a few new lyric views. Background vocals animate independently from the main vocals, while duets show different lyrics on opposite sides of the screen, to make it easier for multiple singers.
To help users find Apple Music Sing optimized songs, Apple Music are launching 50 dedicated companion playlists, with epic songs, duets, choruses and anthems, sorted by decade and genre.
Apple Music’s lyrics experience is consistently one of the most popular features on our service. We already know our users all over the world love to follow along to their favorite songs, so we wanted to evolve this offering even further to enable even more engagement around music through singing. It’s really a lot of fun, our customers are going to love it.
Oliver Schusser, Vice President of Apple Music and Beats, Apple
We look forward to seeing more from this feature when it launches later this month, hopefully just in time for Christmas. Apple Music Sings will be available for all Apple Music subscribers worldwide on the following devices:
- iPhone 11 and later
- iPhone SE (3rd generation)
- iPad Pro 11-inch (3rd generation and later)
- iPad Air (4th generation and later)
- iPad mini (6th generation)
- iPad (9th generation and later)
- Apple TV 4K (3rd generation)
Apple Music on Android will be getting most of the features above, except the vocal level control, as this requires additional processing power from the device.