Abbey Road Red – the music tech incubator of Abbey Road Studios – has today (July 17) announced Japan’s Cotodama Inc. has joined its programme. Tokyo's award-winning Cotodama claims to take “the music and lyric experience to the next level” with its software engine designed to drive lyric visuals and related products.
Speaking about the incubation, Karim Fanous, innovation manager at Abbey Road Red, said: “With streaming, music services have been evolving at an astonishing pace. More music is available and more accessible than ever before, but lyrics haven’t kept up. We’ve lost the feeling of running our fingers over release artwork and reading the lyrics while listening, singing along or mouthing the words when we feel like it. The brilliant team at Cotodama are on a mission to evolve our lyrical experiences. Abbey Road Red explores the world’s most innovative technologies empowering music and culture. We are happy to partner with Cotodama as the company moves forward with new experiences and products for their lyric visualisation technology.”
During its six-month incubation, Abbey Road Red will give Cotodama guidance around strategy, business development, feature development, technology iteration and more alongside exposure to Abbey Road's industry leading internal and external mentor network to help develop its lyric visualisation engine and deployment.
Cotodama will create YouTube lyric videos with Universal Music Group artists and fully launch their next flagship product Lyric Speaker Canvas in mid-September 2018. Created in collaboration with the Japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Cotodama’s proprietary Expression Engine algorithm uses song structure and mood data to determine how to animate the lyrics for each song played and which Cotodama-designed animation template to use.
Jin Saito, Cotodama CEO, said: "We founded Cotodama with the vision of bringing lyrics back to centre stage in the music listening experience and creating a new cultural movement around lyrics and their meaning. The Japanese word Cotodama means 'words have soul and the power to change people’s minds'. We want to help words fulfil their true potential. These are the first steps in what we hope will be a long journey of helping lyrics fulfil their natural ability to move people visually while listening to music alone or in social situations. Abbey Road has historically played a pivotal role in changing music culture. That’s why we feel so good about going on the next stage of our journey with Abbey Road Red."
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