Guillotine

And what is a Vocaloid??? Many have seen the videos on Youtube, but still don’t quite get it. I must say I didn’t get it at first either… So what??? A cute anime style character… Big deal. Once I researched just what was happening I realized it is a rather big deal. Granted this news broke over a year ago, but I think it deserves a revisit as I’m learning through comment pages that there are many out there who still don’t understand exactly what is going on here or why it is pretty amazing.

First off… Lets talk about Vocaloids. Quite simply it is a voice synthesizer program developed by Yamaha in 2003 and officially released in 2004. Vocaloids Leon, Lola, Miriam, Meiko, and Kaito were released. Each Vocaloid is a completely different “being.” Each contains a library of synthesized voice samples from human voice actors thus giving each it’s own unique “voice.” The program allows one to type in song lyrics, provide a key for the lyrics to be sung in, and apply a melody. The results are the computer being able to sing.

Now you say… “Well we’ve had text to voice synthesizers forever…” Yes, but have you actually heard them? I remember when IBM’s Dragon Naturally Speaking came out in the early to mid 90s, and it was considered amazing… At the time. Years later it was rather shocking to discover that voice synthesis hasn’t really gone anywhere. Text to speech programs still for the most part sounded like “Joshua” from the movie “Wargames.” Think we could have improved on that a bit more by now??? Granted these programs were developed for handicapped users who really only needed to understand what was on the screen and didn’t actually require it to sound fantastic, but still… I know most people grew up with Hal and C-3PO thus assuming that we were at that point in voice synthesis already, but the truth is even now we really aren’t. So the Vocaloid even though it still has flaws is a rather amazing leap forward in computer voice synthesis.

Flash forward to 2007. The Vocaloid 2 program is released introducing the world to the Vocaloids Miku Hatsune and Kagamine Rin and Len (Female and male twins respectively). Of course we know by now that Miku has far overshadowed the other Vocaloid characters (poor fellas), and has become somewhat an internet pop idol. Now until Vocaloid 2 all Vocaloids sang in Japanese. With the second version the 3 “main” Vocaloids mentioned still are 100% Japanese, but there were also several English Vocaloids released. But… I’m not getting into those here as they still haven’t quite worked out the bugs, and honestly they tend to sound rather creepy.

Everybody sees the videos plastered around the internet and screams “I want a Vocaloid too.” but do they really know what it is??? Once you strip away the animation (which is not part of the program but rather added to the videos after wards by some very talented people) the Vocaloid simply looks like most other computer synthesizer programs. The following video is what Miku Hatsune looks like normally:

The program is Japanese thus the interface and the voice are both Japanese, so you may want to keep that in mind before you rush out to purchase a copy. Although I believe it is only officially for sale in Japan, so that normally wouldn’t be a concern except that we know the internet doesn’t quite allow things to stay where they were meant to. I also believe there is an add-on that will convert the interface to English (not too sure if it’s official or third party), but the Japanese Vocaloids will always sing in Japanese even though some clever people have attempted with limited results to get Miku to sing in English she still sounds better in her native tongue. The program also is at it’s heart a music program, so musical talent is pretty much a necessity to make it work. Currently the entire series of Vocaloids are classified as musical instruments and the rights to any (original) works created using them belong to the creator with a few stipulations that Yamaha requires to ensure their software is not misused.

Below is a promotional video that was made to introduce Miku.

What next??? Enter Mikumiku Dance… A program written by Higuchi Yuu-san, and written in 70 hours. I don’t know what he was on at the time, but to create a rather detailed animation program in that amount of time seems like a fantastic feat. The program itself is a 3D animation program based on a 3 D model of Miku Hatsune (I would expect the 3D model to take 70 hours alone to create). It is available for download as freeware (just Google mikumiku dance), but as with the Vocaloids it is a Japanese interface so you may want to learn the language before you download it… Or at least realize you will have to go through a bit of trial and error to figure out what does what. Even then you should realize that it’s still frame by frame animating, and even though the program does some interpolation of movement 98% of it is still one frame at a time posing and rendering. To give an example… a one minute clip at 30 frames per second is 1800 frames of animation, and you would probably have to animate at least every 10th frame to get a decent animation (animating every 3rd frame is the industry standard for big production anime). While this program won’t get you results that the 3D models some of the really ambitious people have used it’s still quite impressive and probably far easier to use than learning a commercial animation suite plus either creating or finding a 3D model to animate.

So hopefully this article explained a bit of what Miku Hatsune is. I could post 100 more videos on this page, but to be reasonable I will link a couple here, and leave it up to you to search out more on Youtube.

One to definitely check out is Melody.EXE It is an amazing piece of 3D animation and it’s rather hard but try to keep in mind that there is no human actually singing.

Another one to check out is a perfect example of MikuMiku Dance Still rather amazing that the program used to create this only took 70 hours to write.