Singing Computers

     Oh, you expected something about Vocaloids? Sorry, today's special is giant flying lizards. It's also gonna be pretty long, but whatever, I have time.      Sorry I added the pictures late, but the process was incredibly  annoying, you wouldn't even believe. It involved downloads, uploads, screenshots, and no fewer than twenty-eight images and Google Drawings in a folder named Temporary. Yeesh.      For as long I can remember (AKA, about Kindergarten after my Mermaid and Pegasus phases ended), I've loved dragons. I read lots of books about them, things like that. So, for my birthday one year, my mom got me this book because it had a dragon on the cover and it looked good:      I devoured the series, and made my first OC, Princess River (sound familiar?) by fourth grade.      Then I tried to draw dragons:   Maroon      That's actually my third attempt, I threw away my first...

     Hmm, not much to say here. Let's get started:       UTAU : Can you think of a single popular software, or popular thing in general, that has not spawned spinoffs? Because I can’t. UTAU is one of those spinoffs, the most successful one in my opinion. You can download the program for free, and it already comes with a default voice, called Defoko, which in Japanese literally means default “girl/child.” Other UTAUs can be downloaded from a link, again for free. You can even import .wav files to make your own! As a result, there are literally thousands of UTAUloids. However, the UTAUs really cannot compare in inherent quality to the Vocaloids, sadly. Some of the most well-known UTAUs were created as April Fools jokes for the Vocaloid fandom, such as Kasane Teto. You also get UTAUloids like Missy .. Overall, I like the program, because it allows even more fan participation, and in the right hands, it can sound awesome. Examples: Monochrome , Retrospectre , ...

     Some of my favorite artists are GuitarHeroPianoZero , Jade S , DoNotCrossP , Kyaami and Ady S .       I Won't Let You Cry  is just my favorite Vocaloid song ever. Period.      Some realistic, chill Vocaloid songs to start out with:  I Think I Just Died ,  Dream With You ,  Sunflowers In Your Eyes ,  LUMi Song ,  I Only Wait For You ,  A happy ending that nobody knows , and  quiet room .      Don't worry if you don't recognize any of the singers now, I'll begin to identify them a few posts from now.      After you've listened to those, here are some that purposefully depart from a realistic voice for the purpose of the song:  The World Tonight ,  Dance Machine ,  Pretending ,  Fade Away ,  Breaking Point ,  Mr. Taxi . It's another style of Vocaloid music that I can't afford to leave out. Also, some Vocaloids aren't very inherently ...

     This is the last one, I promise.      Wait, did I say that last time..? Oh well, I guess I'm just like the orchestra conductor in rehearsal who says that we're going to practice this part of the piece 'one more time' and then we'll move on... I literally don't believe my conductor any more when she says that. But anyway.      To the people who follow my blog, few as you are: I very much appreciate you. Thank you for reading. However, I do have a favor for you. As you may recall from the introduction, one of the original reasons I started this blog was to find other Vocaloid fans, or make them Vocaloid fans. So, maybe once my blog has a bit more content, maybe recommend this blog to people you think might be interested? Or maybe people who might like it for other reasons? I don't know. I guess I could use a few more views...      On other news, I would like to clarify that my blog updates every Friday and Saturday aftern...

     This is a list of... well, the title pretty much says it all for this one. I was lazy and just pasted this in from Drive, because I saw this little, useful button called Remove Formatting, with which I also fixed my earlier post. Let's get started then:      #1: Vocaloid voices do not change. This one is pretty obvious, but it has a number of advantages not initially seen. For example, take Oliver. His voice donor was 12-13 years old during recording, and his voice had not changed yet, however he is now 20 years old. Even though the voice donor’s voice has changed, Oliver’s remains exactly the same.      #2: Vocaloid presents an introduction to music making for amateurs, as well as an encouraging community. Hmm.. Yeah, that about says it all. *gives self pat on back for conciseness*      #3: Everything in the Vocaloid community is fan-created, except for the Vocaloids themselves. This gives fans many opportunities to contr...

     No, I'm not talking about Blogger, although the incident with the last post was kind of weird. I think it was because I pasted it in from Docs... Oh well. What I meant was, how do Vocaloids work? I hinted in the previous post that it was not entirely machine-synthesized, but what does that mean? Do they take samples from real people? Yes, they do.      But wait, you say. How big can the samples be? They can't record every single word in basically any language, that's for sure. Maybe they could record all the syllables? No, still too many. If only there were very small "building blocks" for language, which comprised all possible sounds for that language... If only...      Oh.      Yes, actually, there are. They're called phonemes. Yay, now we know what we have to record! We record all the 44 basic phonemes for the English language, maybe in several different keys (so that we can autotune them more realistically), and de...

     Ah, actual content! Yay!      Ever since their invention, computers have been made to do amazing things, so much that they do some things better than humans. Computers surpassed the entire human race in raw computing power in 1977* and since have bested us us in chess, GO, and other games. But computers do have a definite advantage in those kinds of things, they are made to input, store, and use concrete information, which, compared to them at least, humans are inherently not as good at. How about we give them a real challenge, an unfair one, one that is the most biased towards humans’ skills as possible, so we can feel good about ourselves for at least a decade or so… How about singing? The human vocal cords are just so weird and so unique that anything other than humans singing will be a real challenge. I mean, they’ve been able to do that since 1961, but that certainly doesn’t mean they sounded human. The IBM 7094 sounded like a cross between a ro...

     I do have a few things to say. Nope, haven't gotten to the actual content yet, sorry. Oh well.      However, speaking of content, you may have been wondering what these things I've been talking about, Vocaloids, actually are. I'll save the official introduction for later, but for now, the title of this blog should suffice.      Ah, yes, the title. I know that "Singing Computers" is still going to be a part of it, but it doesn't sound right to me all on its own. It had to be "Singing Computers and (something)." For now I just have "Randomness," but it might go through a few changes, as I'm still not very happy with that. It doesn't sound right  for some reason...      I will also be adding labels to my content. So far my only one is "Meta-Post," which has labeled all my posts so far, but I will also be adding ones in the future such as "Vocaloids," "Beat Saber," "Minecraft," "Gener...

     I have finally gotten around to creating a blog. Yay for me!      Wait, why? And what is it about?      I'll answer both those questions at once. I have been a fan of Vocaloids ever since... Oh, a few weeks into this current school year. I love learning all I can about all the different aspects of it, and have learned quite a lot so far. I probably got that particular "obsessive" trait from my dad, probably  meaning almost definitely . However, I don't have anyone to talk to about this. I have tons of information to share, and no one to share it with.      For a while, I had a solution for this, albeit a temporary one. I wrote all the things I could think of about Vocaloids in a Google Document, named, straightforwardly, Vocaloids. At time of writing it is 31 pages long. But it was hard to share with other people, and I couldn't use it to find other fans. As a result, I still didn't have anyone to talk to. I cou...