Smule, makers of such fine musically-tuned iOS apps as Ocarina, Magic Piano, and I Am T-Pain, have just announced their intentions to acquire Khush, the equally music-minded company behind LaDiDa (you sing, it generates a beat) and Songify (you sing/talk/cough/howl, it bends the tune into a song). Wonder-Twin powers, activate!
The amount of the purchase wasn’t disclosed, though I hear that this combined cash-and-stock deal was mostly the latter. Everyone involved seems to see the deal as more of a melding of minds and mission statements than an exit for anyone at Khush, so the terms were built to keep everyone around for a while.
Smule and Khush are more similar than even their musically-matched mindsets would immediately indicate. Take their co-founders, for example: Smule’s Ge Wang is an assistant professor at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Khush’s Parag Chordia, meanwhile, is a professor of music at Georgia Tech and the director of their Music Intelligence lab. Left hand, meet right hand.
While Smule has thus far been an entirely West Coast company (with offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco), the Khush folks will continue to operate out of Atlanta, Georgia and act as an independent studio. Songify and LaDiDa will both be getting support for Smule’s “Sonic Network”, which allows users to create, share, and collaborate on their musical creations.
To celebrate this mind-merge, a video (made with Songify) about one lady’s love for cats:
Update – The companies have just released this video, in which all of the co-founders “discuss” (in a way only they could) the acquisition:
Smule is a creator of Interactive Sonic Media for mobile platforms. Smule’s first product, Sonic Lighter, is a virtual lighter iPhone application that launched on September 24, 2008. Sonic Lighter is the first application built on a new audio programming language called ChucK. Smule launched Ocarina on November 8, 2008. Ocarina transformed the iPhone into true wind musical instrument and allowed the player to hear others play the instrument around the world, and has experienced over...
Khush, Inc. develops intelligent music applications. It offers LaDiDa, reverse karaoke iPhone application that analyzes the user’s voice and composes music to match. Khush, Inc. was founded in 2009 and is based in Atlanta, Georgia.
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