Vocaloid 6

https://www.vocaloid.com/en/

by brudgers • 4 years ago

205 224 4 years ago

vocaloid.com

kirbyfan64sos• 4 years ago

Given how many problems V5 incurred, I wonder how V6 compares, but also how its reception is going to be...

khanan• 4 years ago

But... but... Melodyne..

CharlesW• 4 years ago

Melodyne is (really great) pitch correction/vocal editing software, while Vocaloid is a vocal synth.

deng3• 4 years ago

As much as I want to dislike this, after hearing some examples, I must admit that it has made quite some progress since the laughable first versions. Of course it falls apart quickly if you hear it solo, but I can absolutely see this used widely for placeholder vocals or background/contract music. And of course in Japan - can please someone explain to me why Japanese electronic musicians seem to be obsessed with artificial singing, although it usually sounds like Mickey Mouse through autotune?

saynay• 4 years ago

As far as I can tell, because it allows one-man production teams. A single person can do everything, without needing to find a vocalist. It allows them to try more stuff quicker and easier, and anything that happened to get popular ends up covered by vocalists anyways (and the producer gets to sell those rights).

lidavidm4• 4 years ago

And a popular enough producer can 'go pro' (n-buna -> Yorushika, or Hachi -> Kenshi Yonezu).

wodenokoto• 4 years ago

I believe it is the democratization of music. Hatsune Miku songs are written and produced by fans. You don’t need to be able to sing, or record instruments. Everyone can join.

From Wikipedia:

In August 2010, over 22,000 original songs had been written under the name Hatsune Miku. Later reports confirmed that she had 100,000 songs in 2011 to her name.

deng3• 4 years ago

Well yes, but from what I can tell, it's a very Japanese phenomenon. This hasn't really caught on in other countries, as far as I know.

lidavidm4• 4 years ago

It's kind of an acquired taste - it works better for some kinds of music than others. But I admit I can't stand the English voice because that sounds more obviously wrong to me.

I'm not sure you can paint the Japanese music industry like that? It's more like, this gives indie songwriters an easily accessible tool.

deng3• 4 years ago

I'm not sure you can paint the Japanese music industry like that?

I didn't mean to. I was just wondering why Vocaloid is so popular specifically in Japan.

dotnet002• 4 years ago

There are also other versions of similar tech like Cevio (https://cevio.jp) which can handle both singing and speech. It can sound a lot more realistic and has the 'gimmick' of making voicebanks for various popular people in Japan. Often the differences in the software generated result compared to the person's voice are down to their tuning preferences rather than technical limitations (on a side note, Cevio uses RNNs while IIRC the original Vocaloids used to concatenate voice clippings and smooth out the transitions using some fourier space tricks, I'm not aware of how modern Vocaloid works but it wouldn't be too surprising if they too use deep learning).

It initially became a thing in Japan because Japanese has fewer phonemes than most mainstream languages, so it was easier to make. Then it gained popularity for the cute characters and the freedom it gave to people who would go on to be music composers. Many popular Japanese composers got their start making and uploading Vocaloid songs on Youtube/NicoNico. On top of that, they have had a series of well designed rhythm games on several platforms for decades now which were pretty popular. These days they have a fairly popular mobile gacha/gambling game too.

Nostalgia is probably also a big driving force since many people grew up with either the music or the games.

These days it's still pretty popular within the anime fanbase outside Japan. Pre-Covid there used to be a vocaloid concert series every year which would alternate between Europe and US tours. The reason it hasn't gone too much more mainstream is likely that English and related languages have thousands of phonemes, so making a good voicebank is significantly harder.

_chu13• 4 years ago

The unintentional marketing effect of the Vocaloid characters (Hatsune Miku, Kagamine Rin/Len) is phenomenal. I want to buy and use Vocaloid itself just because those characters are cute

krapp2• 4 years ago

It's very intentional.

_chu13• 4 years ago

50/50, I'm sure they would've liked the characters to catch on with people, but they grew way more than I'm sure Yamaha ever thought they would internationally even. Weebs everywhere love Miku and don't even know she's from audio software by Yamaha

TheOtherHobbes• 4 years ago

It's very clever and very intentional.

Vocaloid was developed as a DSP project at a Spanish university, supported by Yamaha, and first marketed in the UK - with almost zero success.

It wasn't until it was personalised/mythologised by combining it with anime in Japan that it really exploded. Crypton have very deliberately milked it for everything it's worth. Making the output branded but royalty-free was marketing genius.

One bizarre thing about it - it's converging with autotuned vocal stylings applied to organic human vocals, especially in genres like hyperpop. It's becoming increasingly hard to tell them apart.

Another bizarre thing - there's a kind of corrosive psychedelic "What does human mean?" aesthetic that applies to AI art in general. Vocaloid music is a subset of other emulated artforms: simultaneously cute, spectacular, and naive, but also disturbing, overwrought, and uncanny.

This looks very much like a new era, in the manner of Baroque, Romantic, and Modern. It's going to be explosively transformative for all of the arts, and it's not obvious yet that there's going to be much left that's still recognisable after the dust has settled.

darkwinx• 4 years ago

Probably also natural. Japan love to make character for everything.

redwall_hp6• 4 years ago

Crypton actually licenses their characters under the noncommercial Creative Commons license, since they recognize that their whole business (and the desirability for companies to want to license them) stems from fans creating a whole world of music and visual art surrounding them.

It's a great example of a company seizing an opportunity and not stepping on the fan communities that built them said opportunity.

mjr0011• 4 years ago

Vocaloid has the name brand from being old, and Hatsune Miku, but at this point Synthesizer V has completely blown it out of the water. SOLARIA[0] in particular came out in January and, to my ears, sounds significantly better than any of the demo tracks for V6. There's also been a number of AI voicebanks for SynthV like Natalie that came out in the past few months which have sounded way better than the V6 demo tracks.

Vocaloid was the only real competitor in vocal synths for so long they completely stopped innovating. Very IE6-esque.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uf2a2so86uw

hooverd4• 4 years ago

I do wonder if Vocaloid is like Xerox now. People will hear a SynthV produced song and think "wow, cool Vocaloid".

zigzag3122• 4 years ago

I agree. And Synthesizer V v1.8.0 has just been released with diffusion probabilistic models, which improve the quality even further.

mjr0011• 4 years ago

Wow, nice, thanks, I hadn't seen that yet. The DPM demo sounds awesome. I absolutely love that Synth V is still pushing things forward, despite already being so significantly ahead of the competition.

hatsunearu6• 4 years ago

This is quite frustrating to see as someone who has been in the Vocaloid fandom since '08 and maintains a pretty sizable Vocaloid community.

The "realism" of Vocaloid is not exactly a priority--a lot of people enjoy the robotic sounding voice. Making ridiculous statements like "blow it out of the water" really rubs me the wrong way of the typical techbro looking for objective KPIs instead of what the general vibe of the fandom.

To me, this is like saying "DAWs blows physical instruments out of the water because it can create a lot more sounds!"--you're right, but you're totally missing the point.

Here's a KPI: nobody is making music from Synthesizer V, and it's not exactly very popular.

Vocaloid was the only real competitor in vocal synths for so long they completely stopped innovating. Very IE6-esque.

This is probably the only fair argument here. The Vocaloid editor has always been quite difficult to use, and recent competitors in that space has made improvements to it. Hatsune Miku's new release moves away from Vocaloid in favor of a Piapro/Crypton voice engine with a better editor, for instance.

mjr0011• 4 years ago

I didn't mean to sound so negative on Vocaloid. For what it's worth, I'm a producer who used to make songs with Vocaloid (Gumi English) and switched to SynthV this year, so I'm speaking mainly from that perspective. Vocaloid can still make great songs. I'm a big fan of all of the NEXTLIGHT artists (picco, Twinfield, etc) in particular. Certainly not trying to dunk on the fandom or artists.

However, I do think that it's a lot more limited in what it can do. The voices in Vocaloid sound quite synthetic, and there's only so far you can go if you're not going for a stereotypical "Vocaloid-sounding" vocal. IMO, Synth V can get pretty close to the Vocaloid sound with Eleanor Forte, but in addition can also produce some much more realistic-sounding vocals, especially with Solaria, Eleanor AI, or the newer Dreamtronics AI voicebanks.

People are making music with Synth V! Check out AIKA who has made some amazing songs using Synth V.

moth-fuzz2• 4 years ago

The new V6 vocaloids even with the AI expressiveness still sound very much like vocaloids. There's a specific timbre to the way they pronounce certain vowels or do odd formant shifts that always comes through that I'm unsure of if it's intentional or not - on one hand it's very signature, on the other hand it doesn't sound quite as 'realistic'.

As far as the iconic characters go, they're moving to an entirely different engine (Piapro NT) anyways, so I wonder how future works created using them will sound.

mjr0011• 4 years ago

Agreed. I wonder how much of it is intentional; one of the common complaints I see from Synth V users is that none of the voice banks, except maybe Eleanor Forte, have that synthetic, "vocaloid-y" sound. Maybe they know they can't compete on realism, so they're leaning into the signature sound?

hooverd4• 4 years ago

Solaria sounds like a well tuned Vocaloid.

hooverd4• 4 years ago

Huh, even really good tuning has that quality. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcxIuAWX7Ws

megiddo• 4 years ago

Check out Synthesizer V with Eleanor Forte.

Synth V is extremely fast and the output is shockingly good with some tweaking - good enough to be indistinguishable for many people.

Hamuko• 4 years ago

The Vocaloid sound is basically part of the brand now. I can't imagine them ever changing it, and if they did, the existing producers would most likely shun it in favour of the sound that they've gotten used to.

filoleg• 4 years ago

Agreed. I think a proper solution for them to this would just be to create a separate spin-off product that is focused on realistic voice synthesis, while continuing the development of the typical-vocaloid-sounding product line as they currently are.

The audience wanting more vocaloid-like sound and the one wanting more realistic sound aren't really the same, and the overlap between them, I suspect, is not large. So it makes way more sense to capture the latter group by creating that more-realistic-voice spin-off product line, as opposed to being forced to choose between the realistic and vocaloid-like target demographics.

We already know the size of vocaloid-sound target audience, but I bet the audience for realistic-sound synthesis is going to be magnitudes larger (mostly because of versatility of where that tech could be useful, while with vocaloid it is mostly constrained to music production and vocaloid-related visual arts accompanied by a typical vocaloid voice).

redwall_hp6• 4 years ago

Gumi is definitely an iconic character, and the new Gumi release is probably as big as the Vocaloid 6 news itself. (Not only are there a lot of "vocaloid classics" that were made with Gumi, but some of the biggest hits in the past few years, such as KING by Kanaria or Getcha by Giga and Kira, have used Gumi.)

I kind of suspect Piapro NT is going to end up being a bust, with a pivot back to Yamaha's platform. We're a few years in and they've still only released Miku, none of the other Crypton Future Media characters, and a lot of people are sticking to the Vocaloid 4 release because they're not fans of how NT sounds. Now V6 is out and the technological gulf is widening.

ArtWomb• 4 years ago

Hacking on GPU Wavelets at the moment for time series. Multiresolution autocorrelation seems like it should be near instantaneous. And then, that opens up not just pitch correction, but "shifting peaks" ;)

Efficient Pitch Detection Techniques for Interactive Music

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~pdelac/PitchDetection/icmc01-pit...

New Phase-Vocoder Techniques For Pitch-Shifting, Harmonizing and other Exotic Effects

https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/LaroD99-pvoc.pdf

boomskats17• 4 years ago

Ya ya ya. I am lorde. Ya ya ya. (I think they missed a trick not using Randy Marsh[0] for their marketing)

All jokes aside, I will throw serious money at the first streaming service that implements an 'autotuned' tag, and lets me filter anything tagged with it out of my stream. Like, $100 a month. Maybe more.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkMJ5GSC37g

mjr0011• 4 years ago

I will throw serious money at the first streaming service that implements an 'autotuned' tag, and lets me filter anything tagged with it out of my stream.

Well, I hope you don't like listening to any music made after ~2010, then. Melodyne is completely standard for any modern vocal processing, in all genres of music.

boomskats17• 4 years ago

in all genres of music

I get where you're coming from. I remember Celemony announcing their polyphonic tuning engine a little over a decade ago, and remember buying it as soon as it came out and re-tuning a load of Imogen Heap tunes and loving it, in something like Reaper v2. I know how prevalent Melodyne is, I know the commercial and production related justifications for its use. But I also know for a fact that this is not the case 'in all genres of music'.

Sometimes, I want to listen exclusively to music with real vocals. I love the first CHVRCHES album, it's one of my favourite albums of the last decade. As it happens, it took me ages, a couple of years, to figure out that the reason I liked it as much as I did was the lack of autotune. I (ironically) figured this out when they released their second album which _did_ utilise autotune. I never made it all the way through listening to that second album.

klodolph4• 4 years ago

Fact is, people say this, but when artists actually release music that uses no autotuning, it tends to be less popular. Hardcore fans will say “release your next album without autotuning” but when the album actually comes out, those hardcore fans aren’t supporting it.

It’s very difficult to tell if autotuning is used, if it is used well.

boomskats17• 4 years ago

That's an interesting defence of autotune, but I don't think it's relevant to my comment, which clearly talks about my own personal preference.

I don't want to listen to artists who use autotune. I _do_ want to listen to artists who don't. I know that there definitely is a set of artists who explicitly don't use it, who are more concerned with accurately expressing their creative intent and musical virtuosity than they are with gaining popularity and mass appeal. What I am saying is that I would like to be able to consciously choose to only listen to and support those musicians, and I will gladly pay a disproportionate amount for it. Anecdotally, I know for a fact that I am not the only one who feels this way.

Also btw -

when artists actually release music that uses no autotuning, it tends to be less popular

Normally when you make a statement like this on HN I'd expect to see a citation or reference to where that statement came from.

coldtea12• 4 years ago

Fact is, people say this, but when artists actually release music that uses no autotuning, it tends to be less popular.

The kind of artists worth listening to wouldn't touch autotune with a 1000ft pole. They're less popular to begin with - but can still have tens of millions of fans globally (say, someone like Tom Waits).

ilikeitdark• 4 years ago

Seriously, that was complete torture watching that video. I thought for some stupid reason it might be interesting. Wrong.

_chu13• 4 years ago

Autotune also in my opinion sets unrealistic goals for people getting into singing

adzm• 4 years ago

On the other hand, auto tune is great for people to get into making songs without having the greatest voice.

witherk• 4 years ago

I'm sure there will always be music made with varying levels technology. Seems like it will always be the case that any technology past that made in one's childhood will be the cutoff for some people.

agentwiggles• 4 years ago

This is one of the funniest clips from the show I can think of, the subversion of expectation from his initial clip to a legit Lorde sounding song is so funny to me.

613style• 4 years ago

I think you're underestimating how subtle and ubiquitous modern autotuning is. The video here is an extreme example of a very broad category of effects. In reality, almost every professional recording you hear uses autotune in the same way that almost every professional photograph you see uses color correction. Most people don't notice it most of the time (despite most people believing they always notice it).

An alternative you've also heard extremely often is a singer recording the same line 100 times, then producers going through each word (or each syllable) to cherry-pick the sample where it was most on-pitch and blend them together.

Neither one of these represents the singer's real ability (whatever that even means), but both can be unnoticeable by 99.99% of the population when applied skillfully.

chmod775• 4 years ago

almost every professional recording you hear uses autotune

That seems a bit too general. If we narrowed that down to a few popular music genres I would probably subscribe to it. Plenty of solo artists wouldn't be caught dead using autotune or melodyne or whatever (outside of using it for effect/intentional distortion). When being an exceptional singer is your entire brand, you don't want to show up with training wheels.

boomskats17• 4 years ago

The video here is an extreme example of a very broad category of effects.

I mean, it's a joke, it's South Park. It's why I said 'jokes aside' in my next comment. However, if you're into jokes and such, I'd highly recommend that entire episode.

nbzso• 4 years ago

La la la. What a mess. First all the music industry will collapse under A.I. lords, and then maybe people will start to search human made music.

All the stats about the rise of the old music are supporting my claim:) Young people, invest in your talents, with analogue processes in mind.

This will be a huge market.

hooverd4• 4 years ago

It takes talent to make Vocaloid tracks sound like more than another riff on World is Mine.

nulld3v• 4 years ago

I always thought the main appeal of Vocaloid was it's signature robotic sound.

If you want to synthesize more realistic sounding voices there are better options.

redwall_hp6• 4 years ago

And it's an instrument like any other. It doesn't magically write lyrics and a melody for you, it doesn't mix, and it certainly doesn't sound great without a good ear for the different parameters and EQing. It takes a lot of skill to make music with vocaloid.

YurgenJurgensen4• 4 years ago

Yeah, if you're not rich enough to be able to hire a full choir and orchestra, you don't deserve to write songs for more than one person.

squarefoot2• 4 years ago

First all the music industry will collapse under A.I. lords

The purpose seems as usual to get rid of as many human musicians/singers they can so that everything can be made by a single person (or AI in a few years), therefore saving money. In a different context, the transition from multi elements bands to one man bands with keyboard, then finally karaoke, in many cases is motivated by costs as well.

astrange3• 4 years ago

The point is that it enables musicians who would never have found a vocalist before this. Vocaloid has been around a decade and hasn't eliminated any jobs, unless maybe someone hurt their throat trying to sing Disappearance of Hatsune Miku.

There's hardly any evidence automation ever destroys jobs; it seems to actually create them. It's very silly people just keep claiming this.

teolandon• 4 years ago

Vocaloid has been a thing for almost 20 years now. People still sing. Digital art has been a thing for longer, people still paint.

People do art because it's fun. Nothing will stop people from getting together in a band and jamming, because it's fun.

numpad03• 4 years ago

And it's not just that some people still engage in those activities, but a lot of people are starting their carriers by direct influence from those tools.

And, this is subjective, but a lot of those tool-enabled artists seems to do better even in absence of such automagic enablers than non-enabled. Good AIs sharpen humans into unassuming Olympians, bad AIs just fall out of the Internet attention span.

dotnet002• 4 years ago

Might as well be arguing that old school autocomplete (not even copilot) will kill the software industry.

abetusk• 4 years ago

Can someone point to a good open source alternative for vocaloid?

I know of Sinsy [0] but I couldn't get it working. eCantorix [1] is very old and rudimentary (it uses espeak underneath [2]).

Searching just now I see OpenUtau [3] but I have no experience with it.

Seems crazy there isn't a good FOSS solution for this.

[0] http://www.sinsy.jp/

[1] https://github.com/divVerent/ecantorix

[2] https://espeak.sourceforge.net/

[3] https://github.com/stakira/OpenUtau

sporkl• 4 years ago

I haven't used it much but OpenUtau (under active development) has been nice. Cross-platform, automatically handles internationalization issues, and the phenomizer system is very nice. Works well with the free multilingual Kumi Hitsuboku voicebank[0].

Also has integration with NNSVS (neural net based vocal synthesizer) and the entire UTAU ecosystem.

I would say this is the good FOSS solution!

[0] https://cubialpha.wixsite.com/koomstar

fullstop2• 4 years ago

My daughter has both OpenUtau and Vocaloid 5. She tends to use OpenUtau more, although I don't know why.

hatsunearu6• 4 years ago

the vocaloid editor is notorious for being really hard to use.

userbinator• 4 years ago

GNUspeech can sing too:

https://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~hill/extra-synthesis-example...

bearmode3• 4 years ago

OpenUtau is the main one if I recall correctly, used to be really into this stuff as a teenager. Not sure how things have changed in the 15ish years since

nine_k• 4 years ago

It's refreshing that the demo in the video is done not on a Mac but on a Windows machine.

kyazawa3• 4 years ago

I went from Vocaloid hater to fan in the span of this year. There are Japanese Vocaloid producers who are pushing the boundaries of pop music in a way that wouldn't be possible with a real singer. I've never come across anything like this music in the West. Definitely an acquired taste.

My Vocaloid song recommendation: Ungray Days by the producer Tsumiki. Tsumiki creates a sharp, aggressive sound that is disagreeable at first but really addictive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvF3Mwj5d4E

Semaphor• 4 years ago

disagreeable at first but really addictive.

Nope, certainly stays disagreeable to me. I wonder what makes people enjoy weird stuff in so many different ways. I might not like this, but I enjoy white noise artist Merzbow [0] or breakcore from Drumcorps [1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=przphi3RjeE

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXEzn43VITM

antiterra• 4 years ago

I think people who have never heard Merzbow are likely going to misunderstand your post as being dismissive rather than understanding of either opinion.

As a small form of resistance to the surveillance state I partake in, I have taught kids to ask any nearby personal assistants to play woodpecker #2 and they find it hilarious.

empressplay• 4 years ago

This is a geeky song I did in English using Vocaloid singers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2k8EOBL75o

Not great, not terrible.

oidar2• 4 years ago

Ungray Days slightly reminds me of oneohtrix point never.

fjallstrom• 4 years ago

Yeah like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UztCDH2xuQ

spywaregorilla• 4 years ago

Hmm interesting. I'm not familiar with this scene. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I feel like it feels kind of hollow. Like there's a lot of energy in it, but the vocaloid part just feels so emotionless. Maybe that's a cultural barrier though. Jpop and Kpop make me feel similarly and they're actually singing.

On the western side in a similar vein you've got hyper pop coming up from 100 gecs and laura les and what not. This kind of sound, hypertuned and almost as incomrehensible, sounds better to me. You do still get a vein of emotion. I love this sound.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=879ysA4h9r4

vallanceroad• 4 years ago

I'm not sure how I feel about it. I feel like it feels kind of hollow. Like there's a lot of energy in it, but the vocaloid part just feels so emotionless.

In Japan, the term is "denpa" (電波ソング). Denpa music is intentionally strange as it is catchy, and hypnotic as it is awkward. There are many producers creating high-BPM electronic vocaloid music that is chaotic for effect. It is a bit more twee than the western sounds, as you mentioned, but it can be quite enjoyable if you're in the right mood.

More on denpa music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denpa_song

Nanahira playlist, an example of a vocaloid character: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHIyvhJadXM

Explaining Vocaloid in 3 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GODXMGAMpVc

Also, I think you'd enjoy the Song Exploder podcast. If you haven't heard it already, check out the episode where 100 gecs break down how Money Machine was created:

https://songexploder.net/100-gecs

tuanx5• 4 years ago

+1 for 100 gecs; their sound is a very distinct aural palate cleanser that I consistently enjoy. See also Charli XCX's How I'm Feeling Now album and midwxst's SUMMER03 EP

makeitdouble2• 4 years ago

On the cultural barrier part, vocaloids are nowhere touching the leaderboards even in Japan, so it is far from being a widely accepted thing yet.

To me the most interesting part to vocaloid is the ability for a sole producer to make a complete song without any external help. The vocal parts have always been a barrier, and while emotionless and still lacking in some areas, vocaloids are “good enough” to support a well produced song.

We’ve seen creators rise through the ranks through vocaloid, get experience and exposure, to then move to full professional production with a staff and an actual singer (who’s voice will also be heavily processed, but they have a ton of tuning experience at that point)

I also agree with the parent comment that some creators do benefit from the “mechanical” part. Throwing more links, Giga works with both singers and vocaloids and is pretty good at extracting the best of boths: https://youtube.com/c/GigaVideos

Philip-J-Fry• 4 years ago

I don't feel much from that one. But I will drop some of my favorites here in case anyone wants to discover them.

CHO-DARI- - Hatsune Miku https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU1HjAPvHG8

Mum / 雄之助 feat. flower https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjAcngUNiZ8

Hana to Nare / Yunosuke feat. KAFU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqKbuEDvaf8

IA - Conqueror https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3E5fb39xcs

ztgasdf• 4 years ago

Adding to this, I highly recommend works from nulut[0] and niki[1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sEptl-psU0

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgHbvHpT5ww

hatsunearu6• 4 years ago

Wow, it's time for me to shine (see my username)

Twitter Land - STEAKA : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_qQEU_uGjw

Chimera - DECO*27 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6HKcNVbByc

Start Up! - Nariyama Ryo : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFOV9NbkiJM

My name is - yanagamiyuki : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hj3BDehQGc

Dance with me - Osanzi : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n37kZTKbpSM

Highlight - KIRA : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYUNaQaDfa8

Ghost city tokyo - ayase : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWl5viCqGSc

Aqua illumination - PedestrianP : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F02fIei8gZU

These songs might be pedestrian (heh) to you, but there is so much niche and experimental all using the same voice--I find this highly fascinating.

The above songs I think give a pretty wide longitudinal view of Vocaloid music and the variety you can find in the fandom, from just Hatsune Miku as the vocal.

bakabakabaka• 4 years ago

Also adding: a couple of imageboard originals that introduced me to vocaloid, not really a fan of most vocaloid music though. I still don't know what sub-genre these are -- the producers being anonymous doesn't help!

Luka(?) sounds pretty natural here, too, especially for 2009. I still remember thinking at first that it was sung by a human.

/jp/ themesong - anonymous ft. Luka, Len, Rin, Miku https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCSM4W8vk3Q

/jp/ themesong 2 - anonymous ft. Luka, Miku https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jp_themesong_2.webm

Edit: better audio on the first one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC2QrK4c3Qw

fallat• 4 years ago

That IA one was nuts!

knaekhoved• 4 years ago

The rapper/producer Deko has been doing some very interesting stuff with adding vocaloid synth characters to rap/hyperpop music. He has two vocaloid "characters", Lil Yammeii and Lil Hard Drive. Most vocaloid rap I listen to is terrible but this stuff is super well produced. He'll even do things like add breathing noises to the vocaloid tracks, which improves the sound a lot. https://youtu.be/usRDtHjYKzU

He also has some funny parodical bits he does, like rapping about having a lot of money/jewels/etc and then the vocaloid characters rap about having a lot of RAM.

bambax3• 4 years ago

I'm not sure I understand what Vocaloid does? Does it generate vocal parts "from scratch" / just from lyrics? Or is it more like a vocoder?

The track you reference sounds like chipmunks sped up 2x; it's not unpleasant to listen to, and fun, but I feel it could be made just like that (record at 80bpm, high pass filter, maybe transpose 1 octave, and speed up to 180), no "AI" involved.

Arnavion• 4 years ago

It generates audio from phonetic lyrics.

recursive• 4 years ago

The chipmunk effect isn't even necessarily part of it. Most vocaloid music is in a more "normal" range.

It's a synthesizer. It's an alternative to human singers. I can imagine someone seeing a digital piano for the first time. "I'm not sure what it even does. I could just use an acoustic piano. It sounds the same."

makeitdouble2• 4 years ago

A slightly more natural sounding track for reference: https://youtu.be/9vyIPWBeRes

This one if an official track for a popular vocaloid rythm game.

Also, at this point the “chipmunk” sound is part of the brand and will be kept to some extent for tracks labelled as vocaloids (it’s kind of a market on its own)

YurgenJurgensen4• 4 years ago

Look at the upload date on the video. It's 2 years old. No AI was involved, as that's being touted as a new feature of V6.

sithadmin2• 4 years ago

As for the chipmunk sound, it's not unusual for female j-pop vocalists to operate one or two octaves higher than the unfamiliar western ear would generally consider pleasant.

There's also plenty of music directly derivative of the vocaloid scene that maintains a similar aesthetic with 'organic' vocalists and dispenses with some of the awkwardness of vocaloid-oriented compositions. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjJMIWyl_l4

hatsunearu6• 4 years ago

you write down phonemes on a DAW, and it synthesizes the voice for you. you also put down vibrato or other modifiers like you would for most other instruments.

the audio is generated from a voicebank that is a database of prepared phonemes recorded from a voice actor. some packages come with multiple variants of voicebanks, like you could have a "soft" voice and a "vivid" voice.

redwall_hp6• 4 years ago

It's an instrument: you have a piano roll interface, draw in your melody like editing MIDI in a DAW, and add lyrics to each note (usually with some manual phoneme fine-tuning), and it outputs a stream of vocal audio.

Human Japanese singers, especially women, tend to operate in a higher octave range than what is common in the west. It's slightly culturally insensitive to take shots at vocal pitch when talking about J-Pop. Pitch is largely a social/cultural construct, and Japan generally leans into the idea of higher pitch -> polite or cute and lower pitch -> aggressive or rude. (e.g. you raise your pitch when talking to your boss, and drop it to express your disgust with someone.) Just putting that out there, not trying to be accusatory or anything. It's just always good to keep in mind that western cultural norms are hardly universal.

fullstop2• 4 years ago

It gives me Splatoon vibes.

jancsika• 4 years ago

It's a random-walk of blues riffs over a stock diatonic chord progression with a slow (and predictable) harmonic rhythm.

The only conceivable surprise is a crude chromatic key change to the minor version of the raised mediant.

You'd think the precision of those dynamic envelopes and timbral games would push the artist to venture out and explore that mediant relationship to create quicker and more jarring harmonic progressions and modulations. But no-- it turns out to be less inventive than the mediant chains emanating from, say, Joni Mitchell and her acoustic guitar over fifty years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q2jiRUVLgI

(I find some of the lyrics apt, too.)

Compared to the cookie-cutter harmony and melody of the music you linked, even Mitchell's augmented triad in the melody at the end of the chorus sounds like the musical equivalent of solving fast homomorphic encryption.

It's the the audio tech that is on display in the music you linked, so every other musical consideration shifts to the background to illuminate that tech. I get that. But holy shit why does that baseline have to be stuck in the fucking 1650s? While I love the "electrified Vivaldi" hack that is heavy metal from the late 70s/early 80s (Master of Puppets et al), I question whether we really need more than one musical genre based on that parlor trick.

It would be like every stand up comedian ending their set with increasingly theatrical pyrotechnic pull-my-finger jokes. I could laugh my ass off at the absurdity for a year, maybe two. But forever?

tuesgloomsday• 4 years ago

It’s possible you’re stuck on the first slope of the dunning kruger graph.

My (possibly wrong) impression of your comment is that you seem to have made the mistake of associating complexity with quality in music which is extremely common in those who’ve just started looking into music theory.

Most music needs only the smallest dash of novelty to achieve the perfect mix of the new and familiar to its target audience. If you start attempting to evaluate popular music on what about it is inventive or new, you’re likely to find yourself unable to appreciate most of what people are enjoying and cut yourself off from loving a broad spectrum of musical expression.

You might also find yourself unable to express why you enjoy the music you do like in a way that doesn’t come across as if you’re arguing an objective scientific point——an approach which might undercut your argument by making you unintentionally come across as someone who has just learned a lot of fancy theory jargon and is eager for an excuse to wield it.

nineteen999• 4 years ago

I've gone from being Vocaloid indifferent to a Vocaloid hater. Being the father of a 12 year girl who is obsessed with imaginary Japanese Vocaloid artists, I'm totally over the sound of it, although I agree the histrionics produced by these things can be fairly amazing to hear from time to time.

What I did find more interesting was the AI "sung" version of Joelene that was doing the rounds a few days ago, based on the voice of Holly Herndon:

  https://youtu.be/kPAEMUzDxuo

Interested to see where that goes, although I've got to admit, I'm a purist, and any type of digital vocalist is going to make me go "meh" sooner or later when compared to even a half decent human singer.

smaudet2• 4 years ago

There is definitely a element to high energy music which appeals to younger crowds. Same reason clubs tend to turn music up to levels capable of causing hearing damage.

I even exploited this fact as a way of staying awake a couple times while taking long road trips, as a stand in for caffeine.

Having high energy music is OK, allowing it to disturb the peace is not, time to teach the lessons about manners and being considerate, I suppose (buy a pair of headphones for her, limit her volume so she doesn't suffer early onset hearing loss).

No guarantee she won't turn out to be obnoxious as an adult, but that's the genetic lottery, I'm afraid.

IAmGraydon2• 4 years ago

I'm sorry, but come on. Being a musician myself, I always try to keep an open mind and fully realize that not all music is supposed to give you the warm and fuzzies, but IMO nothing about that is interesting. It sounds like mathcore on fast forward with a chipmunk incomprehensibly chattering over it. No interesting harmonic structure, no interesting instrumentation or arrangement, rhythms straight stolen from other genres.

I'm being genuine when I say I'm interested to hear what about this moves you. I almost always get it even if I don't like it. This...I don't get it.

sithadmin2• 4 years ago

Try listening to what passes as mainstream J-pop/J-rock. By Japanese standards, the vocaloid scene is actually pretty innovative.

Shared4043• 4 years ago

It's definitely an acquired taste. I'm about 50/50 on vocaloid songs personally.

IMHO, the best gateway drug is this album/series this is from, though that may just be my personal nostalgia:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_lGrcOtzck

Another interesting vocaloid artist is SOOOO. However, anyone who has struggled with depression/self harm or has suffered abuse should not look them up if they think there is any possibility of being triggered by a mention of it (to the degree where I opened youtube in a private tab to find these links so that I wouldn't risk them being recommended while I'm in a bad headspace).

That being said, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUIelJYMO4U, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OOWWNFTguY, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGZ0I71Yawo encompass many of those feelings better than any other songs I've heard.

I personally like the chaotic quality that many vocaloid songs carry, and much like other somewhat experimental genre's you start to be able to follow more after listening to it over time.

azubinski2• 4 years ago

You're right. And you are too soft in your wording. This sounds disgusting.

kyazawa3• 4 years ago

Certainly Ungray Days incorporates many rhythms, chord progressions, and other structures that are derivative of other works. I think this is true of all pop music though. These strike me as songwriting elements that have withstood the test of time because they work, so I don't necessarily view them negatively - to the contrary I feel that I need a certain number of these familiar elements for music to emotionally resonate with me. What I love about Tsumiki's music is these common pop structures combined with the fast tempo, weird voice, and busy instrumentation. There is chaos unfolding in the music but at the same time it is held together by classic structures that I recognize from older songs. It produces this chaotic yet focused energy that really gets me going. There's definitely nothing complex or groundbreaking in this song in terms of musical structure, but I haven't really come across other music with a similar "vibe", if you will (System of a Down may come closest for me.)

syntheweave• 4 years ago

What I like about the song OP linked lies mostly in the legacy of how Vocaloid has been used in the past, e.g. "Disappearance of Hatsune Miku" [0] - there are certain textural elements that come with using Vocaloid that show up repeatedly, and a big one among them is "rapid chatter" effects. There are other ways of getting a similar result that don't sound the same, just like a session performance is probably going to sound different from a sampled instrument.

If you examine this stuff on the basis of harmonic structure, rhythm or arrangement you're basically going down the path of discounting most of electronic music, which is discretized into microgenres just on the basis of using a faster tempo, a different snare hit sound or an unusual mixing strategy. You have to really lean into timbre and texture to find what to appreciate.

[0] https://youtu.be/5qkTpJAhywg

garbagetime• 4 years ago

None of the things you mentioned are necessary conditions for good music.

numlock86• 4 years ago

sounds like mathcore on fast forward with a chipmunk incomprehensibly chattering over it

Such an excellent and on-point description for 99% of Vocaloid content.

bearmode3• 4 years ago

There are all sorts of styles that use vocaloid, it's not all the fast chipmunk stuff.

I'm also a musician, there's a lot I can enjoy with vocaloids and utaus.

Also fwiw, 'rhythms stolen from other genres' is a really weird comment for a musician to make.

alexvoda• 4 years ago

There are certain limitations (which will get better in time) and it's also because it is a stylistic choice. Vocaloid certainly created it's stylistic niche due to early limitations and it is quite hard to find songs in other styles using voicebanks that are suitable for other styles.

EDIT: That being said Miku can also be amazing: https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm23655091

The original in a more Miku style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqJNc9KVIZE

Or a more jazzy version but not as good as the first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwG9viczjhs

Compare to a human cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEsyBaG-uNw

Here is a different example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIBdpzporFs

Of course the original version which is true to Vocaloid style is like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mqps4anhz0Q

Even if Vocaloid is capable of much more than just Miku, Miku is immensely influential in the subculture.

Does it sound better live ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_xTet06SUo )? Or for a closer comparison with the first link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nepNc0Gk1E8 ? Sure, even though the Vocaloid style has its own charm. But you also do not need to be able to be able to sing in order to create a song with Vocaloid, so overall it's a great tool. If the song is good, someone will eventually cover it live.

Vocaloid allows many who want to compose but do not sing to participate in a remixing ecosystem. The collaborative nature of the community is an incredible strength.

timoth3y• 4 years ago

Thanks for turning me on to that.

It's definitely not my thing, but Tsumiki's use of vocals is interesting and well executed.

GoblinSlayer• 4 years ago

IME addictive music is the worst.

oolonthegreat• 4 years ago

now I know what simcard nano uses for their radiohead covers! I have always wondered where did those vocals come from. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApL1d_OQYk4

pantulis• 4 years ago

Cannot help but remember the lyrics of "Video Killed the Radio Star"

   They took the credit for your second symphony /
   Rewritten by machine and new technology

midislack• 4 years ago

Is there any Vocaloid music that isn’t cheesy pop music? I know of some by Hosono, that’s about it.

dtn• 4 years ago

Mikgazer is a pretty popular shoegaze album. There's plenty, but they're a bit harder to find.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPYqrVDlc_4

Cloudef• 4 years ago

Yuyoyuppe, Utsu-P, Okame-P https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sybi0z3Eltw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt2hfzn66P4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSGCpxkJsVI

brap2• 4 years ago

It took me like 5 minutes to understand what the product does. Why do so many landing pages NOT TELL YOU WHAT THE DAMN THING IS? Are we just expected to know?

VOCALOID6 is an AI-based technology created by Yamaha to fully support the musical expressiveness of creators from all perspectives, offering an even more natural singing voice than ever before together with unprecedented freedom to express your vocal ideas. This product lets you express your ideas on the spot in vocal form while producing music.

What does this even mean? It reads like GPT-3 output.

Lammy• 4 years ago

It's software that sings for you. You may have seen the stable of characters marketed around the software, like Hatsune Miku https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSnKX7kAgIc

brap2• 4 years ago

Thanks, I did figure this out eventually, I’m just frustrated that it took me watching the video and scrolling through the landing page for a while until I got it.

“Software that sings for you” is a great explanation, which should have been right there at the top of the landing page instead of that endless stream of buzzwords.

user-• 4 years ago

Ever heard of Hatsune Miku? https://youtu.be/jhl5afLEKdo?t=65

Its just voice synthesizing

lmm• 4 years ago

"This product lets you express your ideas on the spot in vocal form while producing music." sounds pretty direct to me. If they'd said "this is a voice synthesizer" you'd complain that they were just expecting you to know what that is.

mastazi• 4 years ago

Youtuber "Doctor Mix" recently used it for a rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody, it was interesting watching how he put it to use. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAkgxhK91kk

yoro46• 4 years ago

6?! Last time I checked anything Vocaloid it was barely on 3 and most people were still using v2 vocaloids. I'm getting old :(

IvanGoneKrazy• 4 years ago

The (now) Netflix series "Bee & Puppycat: Lazy In Space" features a character (Puppycat) who's voiced by Vocaloid.

IAmGraydon2• 4 years ago

That demo video sounds like a complete mess. I have no idea about the product, but that is one terrible first impression.

Open-Sourcery2• 4 years ago

I agree with a lot of people in this thread, vocaloid music can be really great and a lot of the great music takes advantage over the slightly robotic or unusual sounds it can produce. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M92c6pl10u0). But it almost never actually sounds human, my favourite example is very good but still not quite there (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_QoqcsrRgc)

I have recently found Synth V, which uses AI trained on a singer and it can produce shockingly good results. It can also still used to produce similar sounds to vocaloids as well.

Here are some of my favourite Synth V covers and songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU_CG_FF6WI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKOSQGKn5Cw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShG8Ij6_Hbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXv_vKX6Y-0

hatsunearu6• 4 years ago

The near-universal understanding in the fandom is that Vocaloid is a not a replacement for human voice, nor is it really aiming to be some sort of faithful emulation of it; rather it is "its own thing", like how a Piano isn't an emulation of human voice, nor is a DAW a replacement for a guitar or whatever.

Open-Sourcery2• 4 years ago

But for those that wanted an artificial singer, as far as I know there weren't really any more realistic sounding alternatives. It's nice now that instead of spending so much effort tuning vocaloids to sound realistic there is an alternative.

And knowing the limitations of vocaloid never stopped anyone from trying. Mitchie M is a great example.

labrador• 4 years ago

I don't like Nickelback because of the vocal processing. It annoys me. I watched the vocaloid.com video. It also annoyed me. It pretends to emotion but lacks it.

spyder• 4 years ago

Huh, it was cool when vocaloid was released but at this point I would expect more with all the different AI improvements available.

For example DiffSinger sounds better (but not perfect). It's using diffusion model like the popular AI image generators. I cannot find English demos but these are not too bad:

https://www.bilibili.com/video/av599316695/ (unmute the player)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ0wNFZGECo (bad mixing but the voice is still better than vocaloid)

code and huggingface demo:

https://github.com/MoonInTheRiver/DiffSinger

https://huggingface.co/spaces/Silentlin/DiffSinger

and other techniques (demos at bottom):

https://r9y9.github.io/projects/nnsvs/

Of course these are not complete user friendly softwares but I would expect Vocaloid would have something like these implemented.

bearmode3• 4 years ago

Vocaloid isn't really meant to sound real, though. At least, that's not what the users or fans particularly care about.

ge96• 4 years ago

Random comment

Saw a cool device recently (it's old) called Pocket Miku

masteruvpuppetz• 4 years ago

My daughter discovered this music genre a year ago and ever since we're listening to vocaloids in the car. It's alright but being non Japanese speakers, we don't really feel what the true experience this genre really is. Maybe that'll change in future when more people make music.

Vocaloid 6

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