Autotune

Results

Citrusbyte partners with 180LA and Oddcast to deliver Sony's “Auto-Tune Your Status” Facebook application.

Working on the “Auto-tune the Ads” campaign for Sony, 180LA had an idea. They decided to augment their campaign with a facebook application allowing users to transform their status updates into a hip-hop song complete with “auto-tuned” lyrics.

With no time for mistakes, 180LA called on Citrusbyte to get it built right the first time.

Our developers immediately recognized several key technology hurdles in the way of a successful campaign. First, it was unreasonable to expect Oddcast to store the many audio files they had generated with their text-to-speech conversion + 'auto tune' / audio file generation algorithms. Keeping those files in cloud storage was necessary in order to have a cost-effective solution.

Second, the application had to be ready for the traffic of Sony's viral media campaign—scaled & load-tested for at least 10,000 concurrent users.

Finally, this project had to be completed for public launch in just two weeks, leaving no room for error.

Understanding these challenges, Citrusbyte engineered a solution based on Rackspace's Cloud Files to handle the storage of the generated audio.

Second, they devised a scalable back-end architecture ready for the traffic and availability requirements of a viral campaign.

Finally, Citrusbyte built an interactive Flash user interface based on a "keytar" encouraging people to play and experiment before posting their creation to their profile and sharing the results with friends.

Users type in their status, choose between four voices and two beats, and voila - their written words turn into “autotuned” lyrics of their own creation.