Singing Computers

     If you feel like my Vocaloid Descriptions and poor attempts at explanations of Vocaloid history, I would like to recommend a good resource for you. There's a YouTube channel called addictedtoheriones , or AtH, which has good, comprehensive videos on the history of Vocaloid and individual descriptions.      My apologies for this disappointing blog post. I am very busy today.      :(

     (Note: I have realized that, ya know what, I don't have to describe Vocaloids I don't like. So there. Oh, and about Gumi vs Megpoid, Megpoid is her product name and Gumi is her character name. I know, it's confusing, but it it what it is.) Gumi has a lot of different boxarts so I just chose this one. Eh. Gum i Voice donor: Megumi Nakajima Engine: V2 Company: Made and sold by Internet Co. Release date: June 2009 Updates and/or additional voicebanks: V3 update, extends, English voicebank, V4x update Language: Japanese, English Voice type: Slightly “scratchy” high-ranged female voice. Sounds about in her late teens to early twenties. Strengths: Gumi honestly has the best English of the Big 8. She is a professional-quality product, with a lot of different voicebanks (the most of any Vocaloid, in fact), each suited to different genres, to choose from. Weaknesses: Her design is… Hmm. She has a slight Japanese accent. Her English especially has a bit of a “percussive”...

     One of my favorite things to read is called Space Boy. It's a Webtoon, which are hard to explain. Imagine a graphic novel, with a new chapter or "episode" releasing each week, or sometimes multiple times a week, online. That's the basic concept, except the panels are also placed vertically for optimized viewing on phones- although it still works fine on regular computers as well. This particular Webtoon is also becoming a regular graphic novel. Space Boy books 1, 2, and 3 are available to buy on Amazon and other places. I think you can preorder the fourth.      Anyway, once I've explained the concept, I can go on more about Space Boy. The official description is:      "A girl who belongs in a different time. A boy possessed by an emptiness as deep as space. A story about an alien artifact, a mysterious murder, and a love that crosses light years."      That's a bit dramatic, but it'll do. It's a sci-fi drama with main ...

     (Note: This felt nice to write. Hio is good Vocaloid.) He is not  Edgy Teen Oliver and you cannot change my mind. I am talking to three specific people here. You know who you are.       YOHIOloid      Voice donor: YOHIO, a professional Swedish singer, 17 years old at time of recording      Engine: V3      Company: Made by VocaTone, sold by PowerFX      Release date: September 10, 2013      Updates and/or additional voicebanks: nope      Language: English, Japanese      Voice type: Mid-range mature male voice      Strengths: Sounds just so amazing and pleasant and smooth, but also has a wide vocal range.      Weaknesses: His Japanese is not preferred by Japanese producers because of its Swedish accent.      Examples: Without Wings , Dream With You , Rolling In the Deep , Sunflowers I...

     I couldn't think of anything to write about, so here's a story about my desk. I promise it'll be interesting.      I have a desk. It looks like this:      You can probably tell that I've had it for a while. And this is after  I took most of the stickers off lol . But anyway, yes, a few years. Five or six? Or seven? I made it with my dad, as a father-daughter project. We made the design, picked out a 4' x 8' sheet of plywood, cut it, screwed it together, sanded it, and then protected it with polyurethane (was that it? I can't remember exactly), because I decided that I liked the natural color of the wood. I colored it with Sharpies, put duct tape on it, taped a piece of acetate on it, decorated it with washi tape, put very nice sparkly stickers on it, doodled on it, wrote on it, put glue on it, used an x-acto knife on it, and did many more things to it. It is a good desk.      However, I grew. The desk is now too ...

(Note: Again, this was hard to write, especially as there is a lot of controversy around them. If you want more intelligent opinions on the Kagamines, AngelEmfrbl's contributions to the comment section on their wiki page should suffice. I think I'll do Gumi next, as I actually like her voice.) Note that this is their V4x boxart, not the original Act 1.      Kagamine Rin/Len      Voice donor: Asami Shimoda, a professional Japanese actress, voiced both of them, although the pitch was almost certainly altered for Len’s samples.      Engine: V2      Company: Made and sold by Crypton Future Media      Release date: December 27, 2007      Updates and/or additional voicebanks: Act 2, three V2 Appends each, V4x update, V4 English      Language: Japanese, English      Voice type: Rin has a pretty high-pitched voice, and so does Len. Len is classified as a female voice ty...

     I am not a gamer. I can say that with complete honesty. One of the games I play is half game, half UN-like roleplay. It's called  NationStates . The second is Beat Saber . The third and last is Minecraft , as you may have gathered from the title. I was going to write a post about Minecraft, but I really couldn't express what I wanted to say properly. I was going for something like the Foreword of the book Block City- How to build incredible worlds in Minecraft , which is an amazing book that features people's amazing Minecraft creations. How amazing?       Air Traffic       Colossal Carving       Dragon Spawn      These are some other majestic builds featured on minecraft.net , which features these kinds of things regularly. I highly encourage you to check out more if you're interested. So, I wanted to write an essay or something... That kinda failed. I think I'll put in instead my favorite quotes f...

     (Note: I know I promised to do the Big 8 first, but their descriptions are actually slightly painful to write. I can't really... appreciate them. They're kind of annoying, honestly. Well, mainly the CV series, and I think it's because people think they're THE BEST Vocaloids EVAH but they really aren't, mainly because they're voice acted. But enough about them! Leon and Lola are awesome, so I'm doing their descriptions this week to take a break from that.) LEON and LOLA      Voice donors: Two anonymous soul singers.      Engine: V1      Company: Made by Yamaha, sold by Zero-G      Release date: January 15, 2004      Updates and/or additional voicebanks: Nope:(      Language: English, although I have seen Leon sing French once.      Voice type: LEON is a tenor with, in my humble opinion at least, awesome falsetto. He has a British accent. LOLA has a de...

     (Note: this was actually a bit difficult to write, as I personally don't like Miku very much. I also hesitate to post it so soon in the blog, as Miku can have a notable negative effect on people's opinions of Vocaloid. However, you can't talk about Vocaloid very much without mentioning Miku, so I figured I might as well explain her, so you don't get any misconceptions... singing anime girl *cough*)      Hatsune Miku      Voice donor: Saki Fujita, a professional Japanese voice actress      Engine: V2      Company: Made and sold by Crypton Future Media      Release date: August 31, 2007      Updates and/or additional voicebanks: Six V2 Appends, V3 update, V3 English, two V3 Appends, eVocaloid voicebank, V4 update, V4 English, V4 Chinese, and an English Vocaloid Neo VB. I think  that's all of them.      Language: Japanese, English, Chinese   ...

     Oops... I may have skipped the last four-or-so blog posts. But I can explain! See, I was very busy doing not-school. I made most of a new desk with my dad, went to Florida, got rear-ended (right before we were supposed to leave for Florida, in the same vehicle we were going to use- that was inconvenient, to say the least), upholstered kitchen chairs with duct tape, drew lots and lots of dragons, found some more good music, weeded our back garden for fun (it's surprisingly relaxing), went to an aquarium, petted rays and sharks at said aquarium, and in general did other spring break stuff. It was fun, and as a bonus, I have more post ideas... *trails off, muttering and pacing around the house*      And now that I've finished this explanation/apology/excuse note, back to your regularly scheduled blog. Oh, and listen to TechniKen and Voice V4 's music, please and thank you- that's the music I found during spring break. I'm going to schedule this to post ...

     The Meta-Notes shall never end! Muahahahaha! No, in all seriousness, I need these to inform you readers what I'll be doing with the blog, and I'm putting them in separate posts instead of mashing them into others because I like to be organized and it's easier to look them up that way.      You may have guessed already that, since I have posted a Meta-Note, I have something to talk about. I do, in fact, as the alternative would be to leave the rest of this post blank. That really wouldn't be interesting, would it?      The first item on my list is the Vocaloid Descriptions. I already have a Google Doc named Vocaloid Descriptions in which I have copy-pasted the format for a description eighty-something times (there are 85 Vocaloids in total, but I've lumped some of them together) and now I'm filling in the information. Some of them are finished, most of them are not, but basically I'll be finishing up one of the descriptions, then pastin...

     (Note: I'm finally starting the Vocaloid Descriptions section after procrastinating for so long. This is the standard format I have for descriptions, with a note like this at the beginning of each one. I think I'll do one description per week, with the other post being something else. I was going to do Miku first but then I decided to rebel against her fame and do Oliver first, so hah Miku, you're not always the first Vocaloid always ever! I should stop.)       Oliver      Voice donor: Anonymous 12-13 year old British choirboy (anonymous because Government says we must protect the smols)      Engine: V3      Company: Oliver was made by VocaTone and sold by PowerFX. VocaTone is the only American Vocaloid company, although in this case "company" is a loose term. They are small and not very professional. However, they did seem to do pretty well on their first Vocaloid.      Release da...

     Note, I am shortening any instance of VOCALOID# into V#. Also, what I call Vocaloid 1 was actually called Vocaloid, but as you can imagine, using that term would be very  confusing. Also note that you probably don't know any of the stories behind these names, that's because I'm doing this before starting the Vocaloid Descriptions section, so you know what I'm talking about when I mention which engine of the software Vocaloid so-and-so runs on.      V1 was the first engine of Vocaloid. The synthesis was not realistic at all, especially with multiple consonants, and it struggled with low notes. It was intended to be more of a prototype engine, however, and there were only 5 Vocaloids released on V1: Leon, Lola, Miriam, Meiko, and Kaito. The Vocaloids "Jodie" and "Ronie," intended to be V1 Vocaloids, were instead released on V2 as Sweet Ann and Big Al- although Al changed design once and voice provider twice during the process!     ...

     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...