Vocaloid2 Miku – The Singing Synthesizer

Most of you should be aware of who Miku Hatsune is; the cute, twin-tail android sales character and voice of the synthesizer program Vocaloid2 – made most famous by her rendition of Ievan Polkka, a popular and comical little song which has been animated with many different characters and remixed numerous times. Whilst not a human, Miku’s sweet melodies are based off the voice of Japanese seiyu Saki Fujita, who has been in the TV and Anime voice industry since 2005. Some of Saki’s most recent work is as the voice of characters Kuzumi Mana and Mahiru Inami in the Anime series’ Ōkami Kakushi and Working!! respectively.

Now that your aware of the background, lets talk about the product.

As mentioned above, Vocaloid is a voice synthesizer program, and can be used to re-create the vocals of a piece of music, or even create entirely new ones. With the correct format in sound tracks, background music and beat can also be mixed in, assisting in the creation process. The control system in Vocaloid2 also provides the user with an almost limitless list of possibilities for their singer – basics such as pitch, tone etc, along with Vocaloid-specific attributes such as gender control allow complete manipulation of the music, granting the Vocaloid singers the ability to perform at impossibly high and low levels.

A “singer” in the Vocaloid’s sense is simple a data bank of sounds, sampled from real-world voices and then processed and digitized to produce the unique notes you hear. As of right now, there are over 18 complete singers in the Vocaloid collection, including the soon-to-be-released “Hatsune Miku Append” (a modification to the original which contains 6 new tone presets for Miku), all with their own unique voices. 8 of the singers are in English, 9 in Japanese, and Vocaloid 3’s singer, Megurine Luka, has the ability to perform in both languages.

Vocaloid itself is easy enough to use: you draw a bar of sound on the correct note level and enter a phonetic into the text. The program then consults its bank of sounds and tries to match the phonetic to the correct sound. Once done, you can listen to the note sung at the pitch and length of time that has been defined; so simple yet so powerful. One shining example of Vocaloid’s power is Nebula by the artist Tripshots.

Just from this video you can see how malleable the synthetic voice library is; the lyrics and singing were all done with Vocaloid, no external manipulation aside from the final mixing and composting of the instruments and beat. As a side note, Tripshots also made the entire animation and models himself; quite a feat when he was only able to use his spare few hours after work to do it.

All in all, I’m certain you can now see the genius behind Vocaloid, and with more and more young musicians trying there hand at synthesized lyrics, we can hope to see many more great songs in the near future.

Advertisement