Don't turn your missiles at me, please
May 5, 2013 1:42 PM   Subscribe

sasakure.UK is a Japanese songwriter/artist who often produces songs using Vocaloid, a singing voice synthesizer program (previously on Mefi). Some examples of his works are below. WARNING: videos may contain high-fructose levels of cuteness, high pitched voices, english subtitles, retro video games, and rather depressing - even triggering - content (such death, suicide). Watch at your own risk.

sasakure.UK has two albums out, both of which are available through iTunes and Amazon.com. A third album is apparently slated to be released late this month.

Video credits: *Hello, Planet animated video by Brother-P and original 8-bit version by sasakure.UK. NegaPosi*Continues video is copyright Sega, and comes from the Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F video game, the latest in a series of Project Diva rhythm games released in Japan. The Twee Box Puppet Show video is by Toga and sasakure.UK.

Extras:
posted by anthy (7 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
Warning: I saw some of these a week ago and when I came to I was five states over and covered in blood.
posted by The Whelk at 2:12 PM on May 5, 2013 [5 favorites]


I was not expecting to like these so much.

But to be fair, I'm a twenty-something computer science student so I guess that kind of makes me similar to people I've met into the whole thing, but never really gave much thought to Vocaloid other than "It's kind of neat computers can get phonemes and music theory right enough that they can sing now."
posted by mccarty.tim at 2:21 PM on May 5, 2013


Also, I asked my local pizza store to deliver me a Vocaloid performance with my pizza, and they just delivered a pizza with no performance. But it wasn't Dominos pizza, so satisfactory.
posted by mccarty.tim at 2:31 PM on May 5, 2013


I *heart* Vocaloid.

They take J-Pop songs that are already about as saccharine as can be imagined and dial it way, way, up.
posted by phrontist at 2:38 PM on May 5, 2013


You might get the impression that the effects are covering for some form of shortcoming in Vocaloid; I recommend you check out (Mefi's own ) virt's award winning lorem ipsum to see what else can be done with it.

Personally, I'm kinda curious how much extra annotation you need to give Vocaloid; the open source text-to-speech tools never get things quite right. Or maybe it does a terrible job in Japanese, given that I don't understand the language...
posted by pwnguin at 3:02 PM on May 5, 2013


So the vocaloid software is akin to any DAW or synthesizer, except that each note also has a syllable attached to it, along with other parameters to make it singing-ier. It's actually a fairly labor-intensive process to get a song put together, to my understanding.
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:35 PM on May 5, 2013


pwnguin: it's pretty rough stuff.

> Or maybe it does a terrible job in Japanese, given that I don't understand the language...

Well, one thing you can do is listen to 'Engloids' - find songs done using either the Vocaloids specialized for English like Big Al or songs done using others which happen to have English voicebanks like Luka. My own impression is that the English versions still have a clear gap where you go 'that's not quite right' but a very good producer can get the quality high enough to briefly fool you. Of course, there's competition and Crypton is still working on new products or upgrades, so I figure it's a matter of years before the default output starts becoming passable and the finetuned output indistinguishable.
posted by gwern at 8:04 PM on May 5, 2013


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