Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Vocaloid: These Singing Machines

Okey. There are quite a few videos in this post. You don’t have to watch them all! BUT. I would like you to listen to this song before we begin. If you’re pressed for time (or too lazy to listen to a 4 minute and 20 second song), skip to this part here to only watch 30 seconds of it… 1:10-1:40
Circles by YusukeKira feat. GUMI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t5JbAue6eY ]
So much emotion, yes?
Now let me distract you with a question. You know that awful automated voice you hear when you ask a translating app to say something? Uh huh. It sounds robotic and creepy and choppy.
Yeah whatever what’s the point? The lady you heard singing in the video? What if I told you that her voice is a machine? That’s Vocaloid for you.
This is what the Vocaloid4 Interface looks like!
Time to zoom out. Vocaloid is a voice synthesizer program. Like a piano or guitar, Vocaloid is a musical instrument, but it’s specifically for the human singing voice. To put it super roughly on how it’s made, a voice provider’s vocals are recorded, as in their phonetics (ba, da, bada, etc.), at a wide range of pitches. These voice samples are refined and put together in what’s called a vocal library. With this library, music producers can type words and melodies into the Vocaloid program to synthesize human vocals for singing.
But hold on. Who exactly was that lady with green hair in the video? That’s Vocaloid GUMI, and her voice provider is Megumi Nakajima. So the green haired lady is two people? Well, no. The voice provider and the Vocaloid are two different things. Nakajima is the voice provider. GUMI is what the vocal library is called. You see, many of these vocal libraries have a character or mascot.
Are you confused? Yeah, it took me awhile to understand too… Anyways, let’s take a look at a group picture!
and no, it's not an anime
It began with only 5 vocal libraries and two languages (Japanese, English) when it was first released in 2004. Now, Vocaloid has expanded and grown like you’ve never believed. There are now at least 80 voice libraries and more languages (Korean, Spanish, Chinese). In addition, the Vocaloid community has produced their own holographic concerts that go on tour abroad, has sold merchandise like original albums and figurines, and they’ve inspired this shareware program called UTAU where you can make your own singing voice synthesizer for free! And there are covers too. There are so many song covers.

Original Song (human & Vocaloid duet): Porter Robinson – Sad Machine Lyric Video
(I'm having trouble embedding this video forgive me)
Concert Video: [Official] NicoNico Music Party 2015 VOCALOID Live
(lol don’t watch the whole thing it’s 40 minutes just do like 5:20-6:18)
Cover: [Kagamine Rin V4 English] Ariana Grande – Focus – Vocaloid Cover by Jirai
Time to zoom in! That first song you just listened to, “Circles,” was composed by YusukeKira. He didn’t do all of the work alone though. Under the description, the credits are as follows:
"Music: YusukeKira & chilichizu
Arrange/Lyrics: YusukeKira
"PV/Animation: Pancake
Illust: Ekkoberry
Encode: cheesum"
Like many Vocaloid songs, the production of this song and music video was a collaborative effort. Collaboration within the Vocaloid community is very common since one person would tune the Vocaloid, another would make an instrumental track, another would mix/master the music, and another would make the music video. Even the music video itself would have its own team. As discussed in the Uzzi & Spiro article, the Q-score, how closely knit collaborators are, can affect how successful they’ll be. YusukeKira seems to have a medium Q-score, which is typically more successful than higher or lower Q-scores. He collabs closely with the people mentioned above and occasionally works with others in the Vocaloid community (Rachie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sePdMu5fqNQ, Crusher-P https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kjqsJy2kmU).
Funny enough, the origin of Vocaloid began as “pure collaborative research, and they did not think of selling it at that time.” Collaboration is what keeps a lot of the Vocaloid community going and producing content.
Oh, are you still here? Have a piano version of “Circles.” It’s really pretty. You won’t regret listening to it!
Circles (Piano Ver.) by YusukeKira feat. GUMI

Sources:
Uzzi, Brian, and Jarrett Spiro. “Collaboration and Creativity: The Small World Problem.” American Journal of Sociology: 447-504. Print.
à http://vocaloid.wikia.com/wiki/VOCALOID
à http://vocaloid.wikia.com/wiki/UTAU

4 comments:

  1. This brings me back--I loved listening to Vocaloid songs growing up, but I never really stopped to think how creative the entire community is. I've always wondered how such beautiful songs (and videos!) are created, so this was a pleasure to read!

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  2. I think the accessibility of Vocaloid is very interesting, as well as the community that sprung up around it! The software is fairly easy to use, making it possible for many people to learn it and express themselves. I think it is very cool how many people will work together on one song! I had heard some of these before, but never realized how many people worked on them.

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  3. This is so interesting! It's amazing how far voice technology has come. AI like Siri and Alex almost sound human! It's also very interesting how it can be done in so many languages.

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  4. This sounds great. I didn't know that so many people was working on the same project. But with that collaboration effort to do what everyone think interesting, they were able to expand the Vocaloid more than anyone can imagine. The Vocaloid concept is already interesting in itself. But having multiple people working together to push its boundaries is even more amazing

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