Karaoke Gets Creative With Fusic’s Music Video Platform

Fusic, an Israeli-made app, lets users create a video of themselves singing duets with their favorite artists, uploading their version of a song and “Fusing” it with the official music video seen on MTV or Youtube. This gives the selfie a major upgrade, from mere photo to full-blown music video.

The Fusic technology blends home video uploaded by aspiring singers with music videos from top artists from most genres, including Mariah Carey, Austin Mahone, Jason Derulo or even “classic” artists such as Earth, Wind & Fire. Thirty seconds after uploading, Fusic creates a mash-up, a special version of the artists’ music video, turning users into collaborators with their favorite stars. The name is a combination of “fusion” and “music.”

“It’s definitely a new concept, but one that we’ve seen take off very quickly,” said Liat Sade-Sternberg, CEO of Fusic. In her first media interview discussing the new app, Sade-Sternberg said that, though the start-up released the app just two weeks ago, it has tens of thousands of users who have used it to make hundreds of thousands of mash-up music videos. “It’s the next level in selfies,” said Sade-Sternberg. “If, until now, people posted pictures or videos of themselves on Facebook, Whatsapp or other social media, now they can post videos of themselves ‘performing’ the songs they and their friends love.”

Users download the free Fusic app (currently available in the App Store for iOS; Android version is on the way, said Sade-Sternberg) and register using credentials from social networks, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Users pick a song from the list, activate their device’s camera and see an image of themselves as the camera sees you, alongside the official MTV-version of the music video you’ve selected. The song’s lyrics appear in a box onscreen and are highlighted, karaoke-style, as they are sung in the music video. Users can choose to sing along or lip-sync to the music. Once the filming is completed, Fusic uploads the footage to the server, does its back-end work of “Fusing” the uploaded footage and the actual music video, and presents the MTV music video with users’ footage interspersed and integrated with the actual video itself.

For example, in the video for Jason Derulo’s “Marry Me,” a Fused production would intersperse scenes from the Derulo video, featuring the singer and his girlfriend, with scenes of the uploaded footage, with the scenes switching off between the uploaded footage and video. The voices would be interspersed and integrated, with some lines sung by the uploader, some by Derulo, and some in a duet between the professional and amateur singers. Fusic can apply various filters and editing tricks to the uploaded footage, such as split screens, fades or tints, that help integrate the two videos.

This article was first published on The Times of Israel and was re-posted with permission. To continue reading this article on the TOI site, click here.