My random journey that brought me to the Vocaloid Fields of Awesome

What the EFF is a Vocaloid you ask?

What's with the language? Jeez.

Anyway: A Vocaloid is essentially a singing synthesizer that was developed in Japan by the Yamaha corporation. Their new version, Vocaloid 2, can actually support voice samples, so you can have a synthesizer that sings with a certain eerie, chilling, soul-less perfection. Sort of like the singing A.I. in Macross Plus (EV, you'll know what I mean, so will any other anime dork).

Warning: This is a LONG post with lots of videos. You should watch them if you can handle it. If you do it will take quite some time.

I'll talk about Vocaloids in more detail in a minute. This is sort of a two part post. The first part is my ABSOLUTELY RANDOM journey that actually brought me to the Fields of Vocaloid-halla.

I was on You're The Man Now Dog dot com as I am often wont to do. I was wondering what the crap the song on THIS page was. (click on it. it's cool and addicting)

So I went to my old friend and mentor YouTube. Wait, YouTube isn't a dude. Damn.

Anyway, I looked up Loituma as that was the only word I had to follow and it turns out Loituma is a Finnish singing group and the song is "Eva's Polka". Everyone just calls the song Loituma though.

Here is the Incredibly Epic Official Video:



Remind you of anything?


Jim Carrey - What is Love - Original Version - For more amazing video clips, click here

And this led me to the techno version:



Which then led me to this little gem of randomness:



I'm a HUGE fan of leeks for some reason, so this piqued my interest (the facial expressions are crazy). The previous video led me to this insanity (thank you YouTube Japan):



At this point I HAD to figure out who this singer was and I noticed (2 videos up) in the comments that it was a Vocaloid named Hatsune Miku. So I went out and looked up what Vocaloid was and learned quite a bit.

I learned that the first truly voiced Vocaloid in the Vocaloid 2 system was Hatsune Miku. (Keep in mind that the Japanese are all about these new "idols" and the vocaloid community has drawn them up and created very intricate backstories for them all that I won't go into here. I'm just going to list the ones that have really impressed me.)

PLEASE keep in mind that these vocaloids are mostly singing in Japanese and in the J-pop style. I will warn when their voice is too sharp or anything. Also they are typically anime styled (except for the english speaking ones for some reason). I will be posting videos with English translations in subtitle when I am able to.

protip: Japanese names are typically last name first then given name.

Hatsune Miku is well voiced and sound quite a bit like a real 16 year old singer. (her avatar is supposedly 16)

Here's a song from her immense portfolio. Many people make many songs with each vocaloid and Miku is the first and most popular. Warning: sharp voice.



After they created Miku, they went on to create Kagamine Rin and Kagamine Len who are a brother and sister duo. They were designed to compliment each other but Len, the brother, tends to compliment all female vocaloids. Also Rin and Len are a parody of Left and Right, which they are supposed to represent (as far as I understand).

Here is a song by Len, and it is one of my favorites. After it I will post the same song sung by a real person so you can compare/contrast. Len has a very robotic-sounding voice, but in this song they also applied some filters over top to make it old-radio crackly sounding.



Human version by Choucho who is a female Japanese singer. This was made after the original song above, so the song is credited to the vocaloid and writer who used it. (these things work out semi-strangely)



So Rin is Len's twin sister and has a fairly haunting voice, even though it can get a little sharp. Most people can't use her synth properly so it's hard to find a good song. This one really struck a chord with me for some reason. Of course the lyrics in English look a little weird, but it's a nice, dark song.



Now we come to two English speaking Vocaloids. Sweet Ann is up first. The vocals are very good if the artist can sync them up properly.



Also speaking English and with the same song is Megurine Luka (Scarborough Fair is a great song). Notice how the art styling on Ann and Luka is different from the Japanese speaking Vocaloids. Again it's hard to find properly synced vocals for her. The problem with Vocaloids is they are programmed syllable by syllable, so you can get some pretty choppy voices out of them if you don't know what you are doing.

Luka is actually a dual-voice Vocaloid. She does both Japanese and English. I will post a second song by her after Scarborough Fair. You might notice some differences in design from her English version to her Japanese version.





Next up is the most recent Vocaloid, as in, released in late June of '09. Her name is Megpoid (strange) and she probably is the most refined of ALL the Vocaloids. Her voice is smooth enough to sound nearly real and her Engrish is very good (not a typo, go to http://www.engrish.com some time.) Anyway, if Megpoid is any indication of where the Vocaloids are going quality-wise I think we're in for a shocker when we finally see the first A.I. singer ever.



Now for one of the couple of other male Vocaloids, I don't like the males much besides Len. This guy is named Gackpoid or Gakupo and he is apparently a samurai. His voice is very good (the samples were recorded from the Japanese singer Gackt, a big star over there) but still isn't quite as high quality as most of the female vocaloids and a tiny bit choppy.



So that's it for my main points about vocaloids. They're an incredibly interesting step in the right direction I think. You can get so much range and perfection out of a synthesized voice. Though they sound a little... soul-less. I don't believe they'll ever take over the music world, but they'll end up with a place in it.

Ok, now for some Vocaloid Randomness. Most of these are either game related or silly. You don't have to listen/watch these if you don't want to :P

Pengo Out!






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