5 ms·

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

by deng 4y 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 4y 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).
- lidavidm 4y ago
  And a popular enough producer can 'go pro' (n-buna -> Yorushika, or Hachi -> Kenshi Yonezu).
wodenokoto 4y 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.
- deng 4y 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.
  - lidavidm 4y ago
    China has Luo Tianyi, Miku and co have had concerts in the US, and Miku was slated to perform at Coachella: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/hatsune-miku-coachella-933263/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/hatsune-miku-c... (Admittedly, those are not unlikely all offshoots of the anime/manga/etc. fandom though.)
  - numpad0 4y ago
    It's Nico Nico Douga/nicovideo.jp. There is a unique community and reward mechanism that values technical achievements far more than it does for presentation, and that I think is forcing creators to go way past in skills than what YouTube and many other social media demands. That culture comes as an extension to Japanese anonymous BBS(2ch/futaba), and I find content from those communities to bear abnormally better quality compared to those from the Internet outside.
  - redwall_hp 4y ago
    I can walk into Walmart, FYE or Hot Topic and walk out with Hatsune Miku merchandise. You can't even say that for many popular anime franchises (only stuff like Naruto or Dragonball that's been popular for decades). I've even been to small fan run projection concerts. Vocaloid music has a huge following in the US. It's just a subculture thing and not part of the mainstream sphere...which is a good thing.
lidavidm 4y 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.
- deng 4y 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.
  - lidavidm 4y ago
    Ah ok, sorry. No clue there, other than the software also being developed there.
  - kyazawa 4y ago
    I think J-Pop in general tends to create interest through composition (fast and complex chord changes, syncopated melodies with lots of movement) compared to Western pop, which tends to create interest through vocal performance. The characteristics of J-Pop mesh really well with Vocaloid where the voice itself is not that interesting to listen to but you have more composition possibilities for fast tempos or wide pitch ranges that wouldn't be possible with a human singer.
dotnet00 4y ago
There are also other versions of similar tech like Cevio (https://cevio.jp 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.

by deng 4y ago

saynay 4y 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).

lidavidm 4y ago
And a popular enough producer can 'go pro' (n-buna -> Yorushika, or Hachi -> Kenshi Yonezu).

wodenokoto 4y 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.

deng 4y 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.
- lidavidm 4y ago
  China has Luo Tianyi, Miku and co have had concerts in the US, and Miku was slated to perform at Coachella: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/hatsune-miku-coachella-933263/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/hatsune-miku-c... (Admittedly, those are not unlikely all offshoots of the anime/manga/etc. fandom though.)
- numpad0 4y ago
  It's Nico Nico Douga/nicovideo.jp. There is a unique community and reward mechanism that values technical achievements far more than it does for presentation, and that I think is forcing creators to go way past in skills than what YouTube and many other social media demands. That culture comes as an extension to Japanese anonymous BBS(2ch/futaba), and I find content from those communities to bear abnormally better quality compared to those from the Internet outside.
- redwall_hp 4y ago
  I can walk into Walmart, FYE or Hot Topic and walk out with Hatsune Miku merchandise. You can't even say that for many popular anime franchises (only stuff like Naruto or Dragonball that's been popular for decades). I've even been to small fan run projection concerts. Vocaloid music has a huge following in the US. It's just a subculture thing and not part of the mainstream sphere...which is a good thing.

lidavidm 4y 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.

deng 4y 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.
- lidavidm 4y ago
  Ah ok, sorry. No clue there, other than the software also being developed there.
- kyazawa 4y ago
  I think J-Pop in general tends to create interest through composition (fast and complex chord changes, syncopated melodies with lots of movement) compared to Western pop, which tends to create interest through vocal performance. The characteristics of J-Pop mesh really well with Vocaloid where the voice itself is not that interesting to listen to but you have more composition possibilities for fast tempos or wide pitch ranges that wouldn't be possible with a human singer.

dotnet00 4y ago

There are also other versions of similar tech like Cevio (https://cevio.jp 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.