Bloomberg.com

Voxonic System Delivers Presidents, Rap Stars in Any Language

by Jeremy Gerard 07.11.06 00:01 EDT

Coming soon to a cell phone or iPod near you: hip-hop stars like Mary J. Blige and TI rapping in flawless German, French, Japanese and Spanish.

A proprietary new speech-conversion system can produce their voices in any language spoken in the lucrative global markets where their music -- as well as the clothing, ring tones and other lifestyle extensions of their brands -- is sold.

The system, called Voxonic, can replicate a specific voice in any desired language. It's already used in limited applications, including film dubbing and corporate communications.

But a chance encounter in April between the white, middle- aged software executive who developed Voxonic and a black hip-hop entrepreneur has prompted them to shift their focus to the more glittery -- and, they are gambling, far more profitable -- world of spoken-word music.

"This is the most significant innovation in rap music since digital sampling was introduced in the middle 1980s," said Andre Harrell, a music industry veteran credited with discovering Blige and founding Uptown Records. Harrell recently became partners with Fred Deutsch, the founder of Voxonic, which is the name of both the system and the company that has been developing it since 1998.

"We think we're on the edge of something big," Harrell said in an interview last month in New York. "The amount of revenue this can generate is unbelievable."

`Puffy in Chinese'

Harrell then plugged his iPod into a speaker system and played "Baby," by the rapper Fabolous, switching between English and French. Other than the change in language, there was no discernible difference between the two recordings. Harrell also played "Bring 'Em Out," by TI, first in English and then in Spanish, to similar effect.

"When you're a brand and you sell in China, Japan, Spain and Germany, people are getting the fun and the emotion and feeling of the music," Harrell said. "Imagine if they could get to hear Puffy, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, in their own language. Imagine if you were able to launch those artists in four territories at the same time."

Voxonic may not be embraced by everyone in the music industry as enthusiastically as it has been by Harrell. After all, he will become an equity partner in the privately held company if it takes off as he thinks it will.

"If you hear Puffy in Chinese, will people think you're being disingenuous?" asked Geoffrey D. Menin, a partner in the New York entertainment law firm of Levine, Plotkin & Menin. "Will they think this is a hoax?"

7-Eleven Meeting

While older consumers may have those concerns, Harrell says the audience for rap has grown up with technology and is more comfortable with such innovations.

"Rappers take new technology and make it their own," he said. "There are 10 million young people standing behind me, ready for this."

Harrell got his first taste of the technology earlier this spring when he was spotted by Deutsch's son, Arie, at a 7-Eleven store on Long Island. An avid rap-music fan, Arie Deutsch introduced himself and asked Harrell to listen to the product on his iPod.

The sample, which can be downloaded from the company's Web site, features Bill Clinton delivering his first inaugural address in 1993 and appearing to switch between English and Spanish.

The Deutsches had been pitching Voxonic to corporate chief executives who wanted to address their global staffs in their own voices. Harrell says he instantly proposed a different application for the technology.

Very Accurate

Fred Deutsch, who made a fortune selling off-site digital storage for surveillance systems, got the idea for Voxonic while vacationing in St. Tropez and watched a Harrison Ford movie that had been dubbed into French.

"I knew that was not Harrison Ford's voice," recalled Deutsch, who speaks fluent French as well as English. He hired a pair of young software developers, Levent M. Arslan and Oytun Turk, to create a system that would make it possible to replicate actors' voices in any language.

Voxonic works by taking a star's speech patterns, recorded during 15 minutes in a studio, and breaking them down into the "phonemes" that compose an individual voice. A second actor, fluent in the desired language, then records the entire lyric, mimicking the star's vocal patterns. The Voxonic technology aligns the two, resulting in vernacular speech that has a "99 percent level of accuracy" in replicating the original speaker's voice.

Ring Tones

To recreate the slang and rhyming that are signature components of the rap idiom, the artists collaborate with professional translators, according to Arie Deutsch. Currently, the technology can work only with the spoken word, though Fred Deutsch says the ability to replicate singing -- such as in opera -- is "not far off."

Harrell describes himself as the company's chief emissary. By the end of July, he said, "a star of Puff Daddy's stature" would release a recording using Voxonic technology. The Deutsches also have signed a major record label -- they declined to name the company -- to begin releasing clips from rap songs in the fourth quarter for purchase by cell-phone users in Europe and Asia.

Sales of ring tones are increasing at a phenomenal rate, with more than $3.5 billion in sales worldwide, according to the Economist magazine, surpassing such Internet downloading services as Apple Computer Inc.'s popular iTunes. The publication said ring tones are the province of teenagers -- also the biggest consumers of rap music -- who use them on their cell phones as "a fashion statement."

"Artists are their own brand and they license their own images," Harrell said. "Why shouldn't they license their own voices?"

Copyright

Fred Deutsch acknowledged that the Voxonic technology could raise complicated copyright and artists' compensation issues. It is also a technology that could be used for darker purposes than spreading the gospel of hip-hop or making Harrison Ford sound like Harrison Ford in any language.

The technology is currently awaiting protection from the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Fred Deutsch insisted that, for the foreseeable future, he will be the sole marketer of this voice-mimicking technology, whose use he plans to protect.

"I hate rap," Fred Deutsch admitted, "but I've seen it touching our kids. This is Arie's inspiration. I scoffed at rap -- and rap will be our first success."