Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Brief History of Vocaloid and me
I have been keeping a blog since the beginning of 2011 and it contained a lot of information about my Vocaloid works. I will refer to the blog from time to time.
My first encounter with Vocaloid was when one of my friends introduced me to a music video, Daughter of Evil by Akuno-P*
To be honest, at that time, I did not find the song and arrangement particularly striking and actually felt that it was quite mechanic and repetitive composition wise. I can quickly identify the voice as robotic and unnatural. I am not referring that the song is bad or terrible, it has a catchy rhythm and melody, which appealed to a lot of listeners but it did not fascinate me enough to check out more about Vocaloid. My friend proceeded to show me some other humorous music videos of (Vocaloid) KAITO and (Vocaloid) Gakupo. I laughed because of how ridiculous it was but was not impressed. That was my first impression, and unfortunately it was not a good one. I did not look into Vocaloid for some time after that.
Few months later, I was doing some research about art songs and voices and thought perhaps I should give the Vocaloid songs another chance. Then, I searched for some songs on Youtube. It was not until I found Dark Woods Circus by Machigerita-P that I realize the potential of Vocaloid. The voice in the high range was really well tuned and smooth and the synthesized voice works very well with this style of song in particular. The atmosphere and mood is spot on and haunting. It gave me goosebumps. I remember looping this song for hours and loving it more and more everyday.
From then on, I listened to many other Vocaloid songs disregarding the Vocaloids singing it. I was just looking for a good collection of well composed songs. Each Vocaloids has their strength and weaknesses, and there are a lot of new ones being released every year. After a long search, I found myself liking the voice personality of a particular Vocaloid, KAITO.
The official mascot representing his voice is a blue-haired male. Many of his songs/videos portrayed him as idiotic and/or perverted which I found disrespectful, so I decided to change that in my own way; I am going to compose songs for him to sing and portray him with a different personality.
One of the best Vocaloid song in my list is by Yanagi-P, A Thousand Year Solo sung by KAITO. It is full of energy and has great texture and ethnic flavour. I find the emotion from the singer very interesting as I rarely come across a Vocaloid producer who can tune a Vocaloid with such mastery.
I would like to also add that this song had a great influence when I was deciding on which Vocaloid to purchase to be my singer.
By listening to a lot of songs, I understood that just having the voice synthesizer is not going to produce a great song by default. It requires practice, trial and error and a lot of experimenting. I can see the constant improvement of the Vocaloid Producers who polish and refine their tuning after months and months of practice. Looking back, in 2011, when I first bought KAITO and PRIMA, I was learning the basics of using the Vocaloid editor and getting it to work together with the backing track. It was a conventional way of composing. However, just inserting the lyrics was a complicated process at that time, especially when I tried to make KAITO sing English with his Japanese voicebank. You can find the post I wrote back then right here: (http://shinyakian.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/works-so-far.html). Granted, he did not have the perfect pronunciation, but it was the first step I took and from then on, I improve base on what I could do.
The support I received from the members in Vocaloidism Forums (http://www.vocaforum.com/) helped me and encouraged me to keep trying. I feel honoured to be part of the forum and also contributing content to the Vocaloid community.
Since early this year, I started to explore wider into the realm of electroacoustic, music concrete and manipulation of the voice. I am integrating the knowledge I had acquired from my studies into my Vocaloid songs. There will be many experiments and I will update my findings in this blog.
*P is the abbreviation for Producer. (http://vocaloid.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Producer)
Online video reference:
1. Available at :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxp9BJ-pDAs [Accessed 19 Nov 2013]
2. ManaLawliet (Apr 9, 2009)
niconicojikkyouTV (Jun 15, 2013)
