Singing Computers

     I did one of these a while ago, except in two separate posts, so that was weird, and I put my Vocaloid music in an unusual format, and I have more music I like now, so in summary, I'm doing another one. Wow, that was one sentence. Anyway, let's get started.      I like most electronic music in general, although I don’t like songs with nothing going on in them, musically, like this one . It’s just boring and harsh. That’s probably a result of my extremely classical/folk musical ear.      I like the music labels Monstercat (especially Tristam): Disconnected , Saturday Morning Space Ride , Frame of Mind , Bone Dry , Till It's Over      ...and The Arcadium. Luminous , Until We Fall , Sugar High , The New Beginning , Levitation , Delphinium , Ball Bounce , Around You , Flute Gamer , Lights , Awe , Our Last Time , Never Let Me Go , Keystone      I got into JJD and Skylike from The Arcadium. I haven’t listened...

     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 ...

     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...