When the voice was selected, I had decided to make the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer the motif. I liked it also that it was her natural voice, reasoning that it would be more stable in the course of repeated recordings than a "performed voice."įor the creation of Hatsune Miku's physical character, I decided her age and figure beforehand and asked an illustrator to create her. Her voice is quite high, but also strong and good on the sustained notes.
Out of all those I chose the young voice actress Fujita Saki. I listened to CDs of the voice actresses affiliated with the three major voice acting production studios and also collected CDs for newcomer voice actresses. So, I first began to search for the voice that would be the base for the Vocaloid. We came to understand our Vocaloid as a "virtual singer" with a distinctive voice different from what a human being would have. What you get, therefore, is a voice with slightly different traits than the original voice. The intonation, too, is slightly flatter than that of a human singer. In the process of mechanical manipulation of the sounds in order to smooth the transitions between the sounds, some qualities of the original voice are lost.
#VOCALOID SONG MAKER ONLINE SOFTWARE#
The software makes the Vocaloid sing by combining those sounds. To create Vocaloid, we record a human voice and then create a library of sound fragments for Japanese phonemes. What I wanted to aim for was that latter quality. The announcements over the school PA system I heard in junior high school were somewhat artificial, but the voices actually sounded rather sweet. As a child, I recall hearing television narrators who spoke in an overbearing, non-human-sounding tone-that seemed kind of scary to me. The recorded female voices you hear in taxis or trains in Japan are mechanical or synthetic sounds and have an artificial, lifeless quality. I think the voices will become even higher-pitched in the future.Īnd I wanted the voice to be lively. We can see that trend not just in Japan, in fact, but worldwide. The voices of more recent popular singers-Onyanko Club, Morning Musume, AKB48, and the voice actresses-have become quite a bit higher in register and lighter in quality. Looking back over the history of Japanese popular music, the popular singer "idols" of a few decades ago-like Yamaguchi Momoe and Nakamori Akina-tended to sing in low registers. Vocaloid and Vocalo are trademarks of Yamaha Corporation.įirst, I insisted that the voice be clear and bright-because, after all, a high-pitched, bright voice is well suited to a futuristic image. *Vocaloid: singing-voice synthesizer technology developed by Yamaha Corporation and software applying that technology. I also wanted to draw from the images of female androids that have been created by Japan's SF culture as well as graphic styles from anime and manga. Since synthesized sounds are often used in SF movies, I decided the theme should have an SF or futuristic character. There seemed to be resistance-perhaps deriving from religious beliefs-to the idea of "humans creating humanoids." So, when I was put in charge of developing a product for the Japanese market, I decided to make it something that would fit in with the culture in Japan.įirst I explored what would be effective marketing methods, given the impression made by the word Vocaloid. Crypton had well-established connections with sound production companies overseas and we initially planned to get in touch with several companies and develop the product in English, and then in Japanese, Spanish, and other languages.īut we found that development for the English-speaking market did not go very well. At first we at Crypton worked with Yamaha, which had developed the software, on a product for English-speaking markets. Vocaloid* is a software through which a computer sings songs when you input lyrics and melody. © SEGA Graphics by SEGA / MARZA ANIMATION PLANET INC. For him, he says, the most important thing about Hatsune Miku is that she makes him aware of a whole spectrum of technologies. Hatsune Miku is actually software developed to make a computer sing songs, and Sasaki tells us the ideas that were behind the software he created. Known as the creator of the Vocaloid Hatsune Miku, Sasaki Wataru is a software developer at Crypton Future Media, Inc.
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