Here's a little singing contest variation dedicated to one and only Freddie Mercury. It is called "FreddieMeter" because you know - it meters the Freddieness.
Why? Because he was sooooo great, you know? And he had such a great voice, do you know about that? Can you sing like Freddie Mercury? How close is your timbre and melody? Let's find out!
Give me a break.
While Freddie Mercury was great-ish (probably) and stuff (for sure), i don't think this posthumous celebration of his talent is all that necessary. The man has a body of work and it is literally everywhere and if you want to celebrate him - just listen to his music and stop looking for a reason to shove it down the throats under some new pretense via marketing effort. It doesn't add anything substantial to the conversation
Seriously, it is dumb experience marketing gimmick cringe. You take a hyped-up topic like Machine Learning and combine it with mildly promising idea of voice comparison. Then you need to make it broadly available so you regress it to the simplest form. And then you tack your brand on it so that it would "matter" more and generate that special kind of "engagement".
The reality is a bit different. Here's what FreddieMeter really is - it is a throwaway piece used to momentarily spike the interest in the brand and then go away without notice because no one will care about it beyond the inital splash. There is just nothingness all around.
Also - with this service you can compare Freddie's voice with Paul Rodgers via some audio input tweaks. Paul Rodgers is cool too (and he's probably a Chtulhu who got Doug-Quaid'd with some plastic surgery, hypnosis and Revolver Ocelot-level of mindrewiring), and did a Queen album too. It is probably the most useful thing you can do with it.
The other part of the problem is that it was created by the Google aka "the big tech company". Which is a kind of a red flag, you know? The thing about big tech is that they are infovore - they feed on information, and they want their information diverse and they will go a distance to get it. Case in point - this thing. It is a ploy to get more data. And brands go for it because of "whatever works" mentality.
I mean - this service will likely generate some audio-visual data of people singing or lipsyncing. This data will likely go down into some facial and voice recognition and transcription research stuff - and at some point down the line it will be commodified as some service.
The fact that there is a statement "Your audio doesn’t get uploaded to servers to be analyzed, so your vocals stay private" doesn't really mean anything - you need to know what to check in order to find out whether it is really true, and most of the people just don't care and follow the impulse. It is foolproof because it seems harmless.
Then there is a problem of purpose - what kind of endgame this project expects? What is the end goal? Just to have some fun and "celebrate the icon"? So, you can record your voice singing some Queen songs and compare with the way Freddie Mercury sang it. And that's it. This use case is flimsy to say the least.
What kind of insight does it really offer? That your voice is more or less reminiscent of Freddie Mercury's according to some broad criteria and lots of hidden parameters? OK, what is the benefit of having this kind of information? What it is good for? It's not a white elephant artistic technical achievement, so why bother spending resources on that? Because Queen brand paid for it so that they can raise awareness and celebrate? Do you really need to do it that way? There are so many questions left and somebody got paid for this.
The idea itself is fine. But that's not how you can use it and find out something interesting. One of the problems with these kinds of projects is that their mechanics allows much more than the business need requires. Which makes the case for the thing known as "the waste of effort". And this begs the question "why bother?". And the answer is - 'cause it generates data that can be used elsewhere. Period.
But how you can use it more productively?
One of the ways this idea can be applied for the common good is language learning. Speaking practice is one of the integral elements of the process and it is not really available for everyone. This kind of service can bridge gap and help people learn foreign languages in a less complicated way.
On the other hand, this kind of approach can be used to study the chrological changes of the way people speak througout the years and time periods. You can trace the evolution of speech patterns, tone, timbre of the voice of a specific individual or a group or community. And that is going to tell you a lot of things about how the way of verbal communication permutates and adapts to the surrounding world.
You can also singalong with Chuck Shuldiner. He's dead too and deserves to be celebrated.
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