Technology Tuesday - Vocaloids (Hatsune Miku And Others)

Hello and welcome to Technology Tuesday; the day of the week where I talk about computers that sing, and computer generated pop idols from Japan.

That drawing is a screenshot of www.crypton.co.jp and is thus, obviously, their property.

Ever had a computer sing to you? Yes? Well, technically that's impossible, but, suspending the technicalities of electrical currents and speakers; it's still mostly unlikely. Unless you're from Japan, or are among the strange few who have time to waste on the internet. Today, I'm talking about Vocaloids.

A Vocaloid is a "singing voice synthesizer", as they call it; and involves the pre-recording of numerous aspects of a language in order to realistically recreate a singing voice without actually singing the words. This allows for words and sentences to be created digitally without the strange stop/start effect that is the usual result of cutting and pasting words from various sentences which is itself a result of the changing in pronunciation based on preceding and succeeding sounds. (Try saying "What are you up to." and then saying it while emphasizing the word "you". The emphasis usually forces you to change the pronunciation of the word "up".)

 You may be wondering what on earth they would need such a thing for. You've got proper singers in the world already who do things fairly well, auto-tune or not. To be technical, you would be right, they are mostly unnecessary. However, most things that are considered "art" are. (To be fair, someone made art out of cans that he had "allegedly" defecated into.)

Interestingly enough, for something that sounds so pointless, (at least when I describe it like that), Vocaloids are something that have gathered immense fame in the world, (Well, the eastern world, as it is referred to, at any rate.) There are some cases of their use in the west, but nowhere near as widespread as Japan, considering a few things; Firstly, their radio stations play Vocaloid music fairly often, or so I understand from  friends I know who have been there. Secondly, they have concerts where people actually go to listen to the music of these computer generated voices, often accompanied by a computer generated avatar as a face to the voice representation. Most notably is that of Hatsune Miku, (The blue haired anime girl in the header image), who is attributed as the character that made the Crypton Future Media INC developed Vocaloid software famous. 

Before you start thinking this is another joke article that belongs on a Madness Monday, I would suggest watching this video of a live concert that people actually PAID to go watch, in which the holographic Hatsune Miku performs. Art is weird. So are people. Still, if music is good, can you complain? If you take the time to browse the suggested video's alongside that one, you're likely to come across some of the other popular Vocaloid characters as well such as Kagamine Rin and Kagamine Len, and Megurine Luka. 

If you're wondering why there seems to be a lack of popular English Vocaloids, there is an interesting bit of linguistic science behind how they get these programs to synthesize the human voice that explains it. Here's a quote from Wikipedia since I'm not smart enough to explain it myself.

Each Vocaloid license develops the Singer Library, or a database of vocal fragments sampled from real people.[3] The database must have all possible combinations of phonemes of the target language,[3] including diphones (a chain of two different phonemes) and sustained vowels, as well as polyphones with more than two phonemes if necessary.[3] For example, the voice corresponding to the word "sing" ([sIN]) can be synthesized by concatenating the sequence of diphones "#-s, s-I, I-N, N-#" (# indicating a voiceless phoneme) with the sustained vowel ī.[13] The Vocaloid system changes the pitch of these fragments so that it fits the melody. In order to get more natural sounds, three or four different pitch ranges are required to be stored into the library.[15][16] Japanese requires 500 diphones per pitch, whereas English requires 2,500.[13] Japanese has fewer diphones because it has fewer phonemes and most syllabic sounds are open syllables ending in a vowel. In Japanese, there are basically three patterns of diphones containing a consonant: voiceless-consonant, vowel-consonant, and consonant-vowel. On the other hand, English has many closed syllables ending in a consonant, and consonant-consonant and consonant-voiceless diphones as well. Thus, more diphones need to be recorded into an English library than into a Japanese one. Due to this linguistic difference, a Japanese library is not suitable for singing in English.

(One moment while I hang myself for quoting Wikipedia.) In any case, that basically means it was harder to get a functioning English Vocaloid, and so has been a thing in the western world for less time. For a bit of hilarity though, just listen to what it sounds like when a Japanese library is used to sing an English song.

Still, it's interesting to think that not only do we have computers running complex computations and administrating factories for us, but now they're making our art as well. I can hear conspiracy theorists screaming "skynet" already... well, not really, but I'm sure they are somewhere while they dig their underground bunkers. If you think they might be right, make sure to let me know in the comments below. Or you can say they aren't there too. Either works. Also, don't forget to share this with any Japanese oriented friends of yours, perhaps you've got some Anime fan buddies, (like my brother), who would absolutely love the idea of anime characters singing to them. And finally, if you found this interesting or funny; and would like to read more posts like it, make sure to like my Facebook page and/or follow me on Twitter using the associated buttons to the right. That way you can get the newest posts as they come, and let me know what you would like to hear about. Regardless of what you do though, I thank you for taking the time to read this, and hope you have/had and absolutely FANTASTIC day; and I will see you tomorrow.

Sayonara watashinotomodachi.