When a new K-pop artist debuts, fans can typically expect that the singing will be done in Korean, with a little bit of English mixed in. It’s a trend that has emerged as the genre has gained traction globally—but one that still leaves a lot of potential fans out of the linguistic loop.
Not so with Midnatt, the latest artist from Hybe, the Korean entertainment company behind K-pop juggernaut BTS. Midnatt’s debut single, “Masquerade,” dropped in May in six languages simultaneously—Korean, Chinese, English, Japanese, Spanish, and Vietnamese. It was a feat made possible by Hybe’s $36 million acquisition last fall of an AI audio company called Supertone. Its technology can realistically generate and even replicate voices, and producers can use it to augment the voice and pronunciation of a singer—in this case to help Midnatt sound like a native speaker.
For years, synthetic voice technology was something of a novelty, used to make voice-over clips or memes, and in Japan to create synthetic pop stars, or Vocaloids (named after the Yamaha software used to make them). But in recent months, it’s begun to cross the uncanny valley, with songs like “Heart on My Sleeve,” the unsanctioned and entirely artificial collaboration between Drake and the Weeknd. Created by a TikTok user named Ghostwriter977, “Heart on My Sleeve” amassed 10 million views on TikTok and a quarter million Spotify streams this spring before it was scrubbed in response to copyright claims from Republic Records, the Universal Music Group (UMG) label that represents both Drake and the Weeknd.
“We’re going to protect our artists, we’re going to protect their brands,” says Michael Nash, executive vice president and chief digital officer at UMG. (Supertone, for its part, says it won’t replicate a voice without an artist’s permission.)
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