Lost in translation

Voxonic reveals the many languages of pop songs

By August Brown, Times Staff Writer
May 27, 2007

Voxonic peddles its dub style

AVRIL LAVIGNE famously re-recorded the hook to her hit single "Girlfriend" in Mandarin. Chinese pop fans ate it up, and presumably her record label didn't mind a few million new potential customers for the cost of an afternoon of Putonghua classes. Could her language coach have sidestepped the presumably excruciating process of teaching her a four-tone pitch alphabet just so she could taunt some poor love interest halfway around the world?

Arie Deutsch thinks he can help. His company Voxonic is pushing new software that records an artist singing phrases in various languages, then compiles those phrases into a phonetic library that can imitate practically any language. Does this spell doom for hack dubs of "My Humps" into Catalan?

"The mission here is to give the message the artist is portraying," said Deutsch. "If I put a song in the artist's actual voice, it keeps the fundamentals of the song the same."

Though the software apparently works in any musical style for any language, some are easier than others. Japanese uses many of the same phonetic tones as English, Deutsch said, and hip-hop hits come out more convincing than, say, a Puccini aria.

The point isn't to trick a Mexican audience into thinking that Pretty Ricky can hit their fricatives like a local. It's about opening up new markets to the prospect of being as precisely annoyed by "Don't Matter" as English speakers are today.

"People in foreign markets watch Michael Jackson on TV, and they don't speak the language but they know the lyrics," Deutsch said. "We're hoping that a song can change the way people communicate."

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august.brown@latimes.com