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151-642: Vocaloid ( ボーカロイド , Bōkaroido ) is a singing voice synthesizer software product. Its signal processing part was developed through a joint research project between Yamaha Corporation and the Music Technology Group in Universitat Pompeu Fabra , Barcelona . The software was ultimately developed into the commercial product "Vocaloid" that was released in 2004. The software enables users to synthesize "singing" by typing in lyrics and melody and also "speech" by typing in
302-403: A recursive <wave-data> (which implies data interpretation problems). To avoid the recursion, the specification can be interpreted as: WAV files can contain embedded IFF lists , which can contain several sub-chunks . This is an example of a WAV file header (44 bytes). Data is stored in little-endian byte order. As a derivative of RIFF, WAV files can be tagged with metadata in
453-424: A vowel . In Japanese, there are basically three patterns of diphones containing a consonant : voiceless-consonant, vowel-consonant, and consonant-vowel. On the other hand, English has many closed syllables ending in a consonant, and consonant-consonant and consonant-voiceless diphones as well. Thus, more diphones need to be recorded into an English library than into a Japanese one. Due to this linguistic difference,
604-462: A 1791 paper. This machine added models of the tongue and lips, enabling it to produce consonants as well as vowels. In 1837, Charles Wheatstone produced a "speaking machine" based on von Kempelen's design, and in 1846, Joseph Faber exhibited the " Euphonia ". In 1923, Paget resurrected Wheatstone's design. In the 1930s, Bell Labs developed the vocoder , which automatically analyzed speech into its fundamental tones and resonances. From his work on
755-466: A Japanese library is not suitable for singing in eloquent English. The Synthesis Engine receives score information contained in dedicated MIDI messages called Vocaloid MIDI sent by the Score Editor, adjusts pitch and timbre of the selected samples in frequency domain, and splices them to synthesize singing voices. When Vocaloid runs as VSTi accessible from DAW, the bundled VST plug-in bypasses
906-401: A RIFF (or WAV) reader is that it should ignore any tagged chunk that it does not recognize. The reader will not be able to use the new information, but the reader should not be confused. The specification for RIFF files includes the definition of an INFO chunk. The chunk may include information such as the title of the work, the author, the creation date, and copyright information. Although
1057-505: A RIFF file has a RIFF tag; the first four bytes of chunk data are an additional FourCC tag that specify the form type and are followed by a sequence of subchunks. In the case of a WAV file, the additional tag is WAVE . The remainder of the RIFF data is a sequence of chunks describing the audio information. The advantage of a tagged file format is that the format can be extended later while maintaining backward compatibility . The rule for
1208-440: A Vocaloid 2 product is already installed, the user can enable another Vocaloid 2 product by adding its library. The system supports three languages, Japanese, Korean, and English, although other languages may be optional in the future. It works standalone (playback and export to WAV ) and as a ReWire application or a Virtual Studio Technology instrument (VSTi) accessible from a digital audio workstation (DAW). The Score Editor
1359-412: A chunk to be deleted by just changing its FourCC. The chunk could also be used to reserve some space for future edits so the file could be modified without being resized. A later definition of RIFF introduced a similar PAD chunk. The top-level definition of a WAV file is: The top-level RIFF form uses a WAVE tag. It is followed by a mandatory <fmt-ck> chunk that describes the format of
1510-482: A database of speech samples. They can therefore be used in embedded systems , where memory and microprocessor power are especially limited. Because formant-based systems have complete control of all aspects of the output speech, a wide variety of prosodies and intonations can be output, conveying not just questions and statements, but a variety of emotions and tones of voice. Examples of non-real-time but highly accurate intonation control in formant synthesis include
1661-530: A demo and combined with the synthesized voice. Kenji Arakawa, a spokesman for Yamaha, said he believes this to be the first time a work by a deceased artist is commercially available and includes the dead person singing lyrics completed after their death. For illustrations of the characters, Crypton Future Media licensed "original illustrations of Hatsune Miku, Kagamine Rin, Kagamine Len, Megurine Luka, Meiko and Kaito" under Creative Commons-Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported ("CC BY-NC"), allowing for artists to use
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#17327943693221812-415: A female voice. Kurzweil predicted in 2005 that as the cost-performance ratio caused speech synthesizers to become cheaper and more accessible, more people would benefit from the use of text-to-speech programs. The most important qualities of a speech synthesis system are naturalness and intelligibility . Naturalness describes how closely the output sounds like human speech, while intelligibility
1963-573: A full commercial Vocaloid was A Place in the Sun , which used Leon's voice for the vocals singing in both Russian and English. Miriam has also been featured in two albums, Light + Shade and Continua . Japanese progressive-electronic artist Susumu Hirasawa used the Lola Vocaloid in the original soundtrack of Paprika by Satoshi Kon . The software's biggest asset is its ability to see continued usage even long after its initial release date. Leon
2114-543: A home computer. Many computer operating systems have included speech synthesizers since the early 1990s. A text-to-speech system (or "engine") is composed of two parts: a front-end and a back-end . The front-end has two major tasks. First, it converts raw text containing symbols like numbers and abbreviations into the equivalent of written-out words. This process is often called text normalization , pre-processing , or tokenization . The front-end then assigns phonetic transcriptions to each word, and divides and marks
2265-604: A lack of universally agreed objective evaluation criteria. Different organizations often use different speech data. The quality of speech synthesis systems also depends on the quality of the production technique (which may involve analogue or digital recording) and on the facilities used to replay the speech. Evaluating speech synthesis systems has therefore often been compromised by differences between production techniques and replay facilities. WAV Waveform Audio File Format ( WAVE , or WAV due to its filename extension ; pronounced / w æ v / or / w eɪ v / )
2416-459: A leek, and sang the Finnish song " Ievan Polkka " like the flash animation " Loituma Girl ", on Nico Nico Douga. According to Crypton, they knew that users of Nico Nico Douga had started posting videos with songs created by the software before Hatsune Miku, but the video presented multifarious possibilities of applying the software in multimedia content creation—notably the dōjin culture. As
2567-486: A manga, six books, and two theatre works were produced by the series creator. Another theater production based on "Cantarella", a song sung by Kaito and produced by Kurousa-P, was also set to hit the stage and will run Shibuya's Space Zero theater in Tokyo from August 3 to August 7, 2011. The website has become so influential that studios often post demos on Nico Nico Douga, as well as other websites such as YouTube , as part of
2718-529: A mobile phone game called Hatsune Miku Vocalo x Live was produced by Japanese mobile social gaming website Gree. TinierMe Gacha also made attire that looks like Miku for their services, allowing users to make their avatar resemble the Crypton Vocaloids. Two unofficial manga were also produced for the series, Maker Unofficial: Hatsune Mix being the most well known of the two, which was released by Jive in their Comic Rush magazine; this series
2869-488: A number based on surrounding words, numbers, and punctuation, and sometimes the system provides a way to specify the context if it is ambiguous. Roman numerals can also be read differently depending on context. For example, "Henry VIII" reads as "Henry the Eighth", while "Chapter VIII" reads as "Chapter Eight". Similarly, abbreviations can be ambiguous. For example, the abbreviation "in" for "inches" must be differentiated from
3020-556: A sequence: "A LIST chunk contains a list, or ordered sequence, of subchunks." However, the specification does not give a formal specification of the INFO chunk; an example INFO LIST chunk ignores the chunk sequence implied in the INFO description. The LIST chunk definition for <wave-data> does use the LIST chunk as a sequence container with good formal semantics. The WAV specification supports, and most WAV files use,
3171-404: A set of subchunks and an ordered sequence of subchunks. The RIFF form chunk suggests it should be a sequence container. Sequencing information is specified in the RIFF form of a WAV file consistent with the formalism: "However, <fmt-ck> must always occur before <wave-data> , and both of these chunks are mandatory in a WAVE file." The specification suggests a LIST chunk is also
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#17327943693223322-413: A single contiguous array of audio samples. The specification also supports discrete blocks of samples and silence that are played in order. The specification for the sample data contains apparent errors: Apparently <data-list> (undefined) and <wave-list> (defined but not referenced) should be identical. Even with this resolved, the productions then allow a <data-ck> to contain
3473-617: A specialized software that enabled it to read Italian. A second version, released in 1978, was also able to sing Italian in an " a cappella " style. Dominant systems in the 1980s and 1990s were the DECtalk system, based largely on the work of Dennis Klatt at MIT, and the Bell Labs system; the latter was one of the first multilingual language-independent systems, making extensive use of natural language processing methods. Handheld electronics featuring speech synthesis began emerging in
3624-411: A synthesizer can incorporate a model of the vocal tract and other human voice characteristics to create a completely "synthetic" voice output. The quality of a speech synthesizer is judged by its similarity to the human voice and by its ability to be understood clearly. An intelligible text-to-speech program allows people with visual impairments or reading disabilities to listen to written words on
3775-468: A tool developed by ElevenLabs to create voice deepfakes that defeated a bank's voice-authentication system. The process of normalizing text is rarely straightforward. Texts are full of heteronyms , numbers , and abbreviations that all require expansion into a phonetic representation. There are many spellings in English which are pronounced differently based on context. For example, "My latest project
3926-597: A virtual idol on a projection screen during Animelo Summer Live at the Saitama Super Arena on August 22, 2009. At the "MikuFes '09 (Summer)" event on August 31, 2009, her image was screened by rear projection on a mostly-transparent screen. Miku also performed her first overseas live concert on November 21, 2009, during Anime Festival Asia (AFA) in Singapore . On March 9, 2010, Miku's first solo live performance titled "Miku no Hi Kanshasai 39's Giving Day"
4077-438: A waveguide or transmission-line analog of the human oral and nasal tracts controlled by Carré's "distinctive region model". More recent synthesizers, developed by Jorge C. Lucero and colleagues, incorporate models of vocal fold biomechanics, glottal aerodynamics and acoustic wave propagation in the bronchi, trachea, nasal and oral cavities, and thus constitute full systems of physics-based speech simulation. HMM-based synthesis
4228-567: A year in Tokyo or the neighboring Kanagawa Prefecture . The event brings producers and illustrators involved with the production of Vocaloid art and music together so they can sell their work to others. The original event was held in 2007 with 48 groups, or "circles", given permission to host stalls at the event for the selling of their goods. The event soon gained popularity and at the 14th event, nearly 500 groups had been chosen to have stalls. Additionally, Japanese companies involved with production of
4379-402: Is CSET chunk to specify the country code, language, dialect, and code page for the strings in a RIFF file. For example, specifying an appropriate CSET chunk should allow the strings in an INFO chunk (and other chunks throughout the RIFF file) to be interpreted as Cyrillic or Japanese characters. RIFF also defines a JUNK chunk whose contents are uninteresting. The chunk allows
4530-411: Is speech recognition . Synthesized speech can be created by concatenating pieces of recorded speech that are stored in a database . Systems differ in the size of the stored speech units; a system that stores phones or diphones provides the largest output range, but may lack clarity. For specific usage domains, the storage of entire words or sentences allows for high-quality output. Alternatively,
4681-431: Is a piano roll style editor to input notes, lyrics, and some expressions. When entering lyrics, the editor automatically converts them into Vocaloid phonetic symbols using the built-in pronunciation dictionary. The user can directly edit the phonetic symbols of unregistered words. The Score Editor offers various parameters to add expressions to singing voices. The user is supposed to optimize these parameters that best fit
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4832-409: Is a joint collaboration between Vocalo Revolution and the school fashion line "Cecil McBee" Music x Fashion x Dance . Piapro also held a competition with famous fashion brands with the winners seeing their Lolita -based designs reproduced for sale by the company Putumayo. A radio station set up a 1-hour program containing nothing but Vocaloid-based music. The Vocaloid software had a great influence on
4983-442: Is a synthesis method based on hidden Markov models , also called Statistical Parametric Synthesis. In this system, the frequency spectrum ( vocal tract ), fundamental frequency (voice source), and duration ( prosody ) of speech are modeled simultaneously by HMMs. Speech waveforms are generated from HMMs themselves based on the maximum likelihood criterion. Sinewave synthesis is a technique for synthesizing speech by replacing
5134-575: Is an audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on personal computers . The format was developed and published for the first time in 1991 by IBM and Microsoft . It is the main format used on Microsoft Windows systems for uncompressed audio . The usual bitstream encoding is the linear pulse-code modulation (LPCM) format. WAV is an application of the Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) bitstream format method for storing data in chunks , and thus
5285-406: Is an important technology for speech synthesis and coding, and in the 1990s was adopted by almost all international speech coding standards as an essential component, contributing to the enhancement of digital speech communication over mobile channels and the internet. In 1975, MUSA was released, and was one of the first Speech Synthesis systems. It consisted of a stand-alone computer hardware and
5436-466: Is another problem that TTS systems have to address. It is a simple programming challenge to convert a number into words (at least in English), like "1325" becoming "one thousand three hundred twenty-five". However, numbers occur in many different contexts; "1325" may also be read as "one three two five", "thirteen twenty-five" or "thirteen hundred and twenty five". A TTS system can often infer how to expand
5587-531: Is built to adjust the intonation and pacing of delivery based on the context of language input used. It uses advanced algorithms to analyze the contextual aspects of text, aiming to detect emotions like anger, sadness, happiness, or alarm, which enables the system to understand the user's sentiment, resulting in a more realistic and human-like inflection. Other features include multilingual speech generation and long-form content creation with contextually-aware voices. The DNN-based speech synthesizers are approaching
5738-423: Is contained in the speech database. At runtime, the target prosody of a sentence is superimposed on these minimal units by means of digital signal processing techniques such as linear predictive coding , PSOLA or MBROLA . or more recent techniques such as pitch modification in the source domain using discrete cosine transform . Diphone synthesis suffers from the sonic glitches of concatenative synthesis and
5889-491: Is drawn by Vocaloid artist Kei Garou. The series features the Crypton Vocaloids in various scenarios, a different one each week. The series focuses on the Crypton Vocaloids, although Internet Co., Ltd.'s Gackpoid Vocaloid makes a guest appearance in two chapters. The series also saw guest cameos of Vocaloid variants such as Hachune Miku, Yowane Haku, Akita Neru and the Utauloid Kasane Teto . The series comprises
6040-631: Is generally categorized into the concatenative synthesis in the frequency domain , which splices and processes the vocal fragments extracted from human singing voices, in the forms of time-frequency representation . The Vocaloid system can produce the realistic voices by adding vocal expressions like the vibrato on the score information. Initially, Vocaloid's synthesis technology was called "Frequency-domain Singing Articulation Splicing and Shaping" ( 周波数ドメイン歌唱アーティキュレーション接続法 , Shūhasū-domein kashō ātikyurēshon setsuzoku-hō ) on
6191-403: Is limited to files that are less than 4 GiB , because of its use of a 32-bit unsigned integer to record the file size in the header. Although this is equivalent to about 6.8 hours of CD-quality audio at 44.1 kHz, 16-bit stereo , it is sometimes necessary to exceed this limit, especially when greater sampling rates , bit resolutions or channel count are required. The W64 format
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6342-504: Is not always the goal of a speech synthesis system, and formant synthesis systems have advantages over concatenative systems. Formant-synthesized speech can be reliably intelligible, even at very high speeds, avoiding the acoustic glitches that commonly plague concatenative systems. High-speed synthesized speech is used by the visually impaired to quickly navigate computers using a screen reader . Formant synthesizers are usually smaller programs than concatenative systems because they do not have
6493-537: Is only available as a bundle; the standard version includes four voices and the premium version includes eight. This is the first time since Vocaloid 2 that a Vocaloid engine has been sold with vocals, as they were previously sold separately starting with Vocaloid 3. Vocaloid 6 was released on October 13, 2022, with support for previous voices from Vocaloid 3 and later, and a new line of Vocaloid voices on their own engine within Vocaloid 6 known as Vocaloid:AI. The product
6644-576: Is only sold as a bundle, and the standard version includes the 4 voices included with Vocaloid 5, as well as 4 new voices from the Vocaloid:AI line. Vocaloid 6's AI voicebanks support English and Japanese by default, though Yamaha announced they intended to add support for Chinese. Vocaloid 6 also includes a feature where a user can import audio of themselves singing and have Vocaloid:AI recreate that audio with one of its vocals. The following products are able to be purchased; Though developed by Yamaha,
6795-406: Is quick and accurate, but completely fails if it is given a word which is not in its dictionary. As dictionary size grows, so too does the memory space requirements of the synthesis system. On the other hand, the rule-based approach works on any input, but the complexity of the rules grows substantially as the system takes into account irregular spellings or pronunciations. (Consider that the word "of"
6946-415: Is quite successful for many cases such as whether "read" should be pronounced as "red" implying past tense, or as "reed" implying present tense. Typical error rates when using HMMs in this fashion are usually below five percent. These techniques also work well for most European languages, although access to required training corpora is frequently difficult in these languages. Deciding how to convert numbers
7097-452: Is realized as /ˌklɪəɹˈʌʊt/ ). Likewise in French , many final consonants become no longer silent if followed by a word that begins with a vowel, an effect called liaison . This alternation cannot be reproduced by a simple word-concatenation system, which would require additional complexity to be context-sensitive . Formant synthesis does not use human speech samples at runtime. Instead,
7248-407: Is segmented into some or all of the following: individual phones , diphones , half-phones, syllables , morphemes , words , phrases , and sentences . Typically, the division into segments is done using a specially modified speech recognizer set to a "forced alignment" mode with some manual correction afterward, using visual representations such as the waveform and spectrogram . An index of
7399-487: Is similar to the 8SVX and the Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) format used on Amiga and Macintosh computers, respectively. The WAV file is an instance of a Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) defined by IBM and Microsoft . The RIFF format acts as a wrapper for various audio coding formats . Though a WAV file can contain compressed audio, the most common WAV audio format
7550-522: Is stored by the program. Determining the correct pronunciation of each word is a matter of looking up each word in the dictionary and replacing the spelling with the pronunciation specified in the dictionary. The other approach is rule-based, in which pronunciation rules are applied to words to determine their pronunciations based on their spellings. This is similar to the "sounding out", or synthetic phonics , approach to learning reading. Each approach has advantages and drawbacks. The dictionary-based approach
7701-787: Is the NeXT -based system originally developed and marketed by Trillium Sound Research, a spin-off company of the University of Calgary , where much of the original research was conducted. Following the demise of the various incarnations of NeXT (started by Steve Jobs in the late 1980s and merged with Apple Computer in 1997), the Trillium software was published under the GNU General Public License, with work continuing as gnuspeech . The system, first marketed in 1994, provides full articulatory-based text-to-speech conversion using
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#17327943693227852-438: Is the ease with which the output is understood. The ideal speech synthesizer is both natural and intelligible. Speech synthesis systems usually try to maximize both characteristics. The two primary technologies generating synthetic speech waveforms are concatenative synthesis and formant synthesis . Each technology has strengths and weaknesses, and the intended uses of a synthesis system will typically determine which approach
8003-622: Is to learn how to better project my voice" contains two pronunciations of "project". Most text-to-speech (TTS) systems do not generate semantic representations of their input texts, as processes for doing so are unreliable, poorly understood, and computationally ineffective. As a result, various heuristic techniques are used to guess the proper way to disambiguate homographs , like examining neighboring words and using statistics about frequency of occurrence. Recently TTS systems have begun to use HMMs (discussed above ) to generate " parts of speech " to aid in disambiguating homographs. This technique
8154-422: Is uncommon except among video, music and audio professionals. The high resolution of the format makes it suitable for retaining first generation archived files of high quality, for use on a system where disk space and network bandwidth are not constraints. In spite of their large size, uncompressed WAV files are used by most radio broadcasters, especially those that have adopted a tapeless system. The WAV format
8305-561: Is uncompressed audio in the linear pulse-code modulation (LPCM) format. LPCM is also the standard audio coding format for audio CDs , which store two-channel LPCM audio sampled at 44.1 kHz with 16 bits per sample . Since LPCM is uncompressed and retains all of the samples of an audio track, professional users or audio experts may use the WAV format with LPCM audio for maximum audio quality. WAV files can also be edited and manipulated with relative ease using software. On Microsoft Windows,
8456-566: Is used. Concatenative synthesis is based on the concatenation (stringing together) of segments of recorded speech. Generally, concatenative synthesis produces the most natural-sounding synthesized speech. However, differences between natural variations in speech and the nature of the automated techniques for segmenting the waveforms sometimes result in audible glitches in the output. There are three main sub-types of concatenative synthesis. Unit selection synthesis uses large databases of recorded speech. During database creation, each recorded utterance
8607-408: Is very common in English, yet is the only word in which the letter "f" is pronounced [v] .) As a result, nearly all speech synthesis systems use a combination of these approaches. Languages with a phonemic orthography have a very regular writing system, and the prediction of the pronunciation of words based on their spellings is quite successful. Speech synthesis systems for such languages often use
8758-446: Is very simple to implement, and has been in commercial use for a long time, in devices like talking clocks and calculators. The level of naturalness of these systems can be very high because the variety of sentence types is limited, and they closely match the prosody and intonation of the original recordings. Because these systems are limited by the words and phrases in their databases, they are not general-purpose and can only synthesize
8909-459: The INFO chunk was defined for RIFF in version 1.0, the chunk was not referenced in the formal specification of a WAV file. Many readers had trouble processing this. Consequently, the safest thing to do from an interchange standpoint was to omit the INFO chunk and other extensions and send a lowest-common-denominator file. There are other INFO chunk placement problems . RIFF files were expected to be used in international environments, so there
9060-712: The German - Danish scientist Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein won the first prize in a competition announced by the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts for models he built of the human vocal tract that could produce the five long vowel sounds (in International Phonetic Alphabet notation: [aː] , [eː] , [iː] , [oː] and [uː] ). There followed the bellows -operated " acoustic-mechanical speech machine " of Wolfgang von Kempelen of Pressburg , Hungary, described in
9211-628: The HAL 9000 computer sings the same song as astronaut Dave Bowman puts it to sleep. Despite the success of purely electronic speech synthesis, research into mechanical speech-synthesizers continues. Linear predictive coding (LPC), a form of speech coding , began development with the work of Fumitada Itakura of Nagoya University and Shuzo Saito of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) in 1966. Further developments in LPC technology were made by Bishnu S. Atal and Manfred R. Schroeder at Bell Labs during
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#17327943693229362-734: The Nokia Theater during Anime Expo ; the concert was identical to the March 9, 2010 event except for a few improvements and new songs. Another concert was held in Sapporo on August 16 and 17, 2011. Hatsune Miku also had a concert in Singapore on November 11, 2011. Since then, there have been multiple concerts every year featuring Miku in various concert series, such as Magical Mirai, and Miku Expo . The software became very popular in Japan upon
9513-554: The United States state of Nevada 's Black Rock Desert , though it did not reach outer space . In late November 2009, a petition was launched in order to get a custom made Hatsune Miku aluminum plate (8 cm x 12 cm, 3.1" x 4.7") made that would be used as a balancing weight for the Japanese Venus space probe Akatsuki . Started by Hatsune Miku fan Sumio Morioka that goes by chodenzi-P, this project received
9664-446: The emotion of a generated line using emotional contextualizers (a term coined by this project), a sentence or phrase that conveys the emotion of the take that serves as a guide for the model during inference. ElevenLabs is primarily known for its browser-based , AI-assisted text-to-speech software, Speech Synthesis, which can produce lifelike speech by synthesizing vocal emotion and intonation . The company states its software
9815-492: The formants (main bands of energy) with pure tone whistles. Deep learning speech synthesis uses deep neural networks (DNN) to produce artificial speech from text (text-to-speech) or spectrum (vocoder). The deep neural networks are trained using a large amount of recorded speech and, in the case of a text-to-speech system, the associated labels and/or input text. 15.ai uses a multi-speaker model —hundreds of voices are trained concurrently rather than sequentially, decreasing
9966-661: The 1970s. LPC was later the basis for early speech synthesizer chips, such as the Texas Instruments LPC Speech Chips used in the Speak & Spell toys from 1978. In 1975, Fumitada Itakura developed the line spectral pairs (LSP) method for high-compression speech coding, while at NTT. From 1975 to 1981, Itakura studied problems in speech analysis and synthesis based on the LSP method. In 1980, his team developed an LSP-based speech synthesizer chip. LSP
10117-639: The 1970s. One of the first was the Telesensory Systems Inc. (TSI) Speech+ portable calculator for the blind in 1976. Other devices had primarily educational purposes, such as the Speak & Spell toy produced by Texas Instruments in 1978. Fidelity released a speaking version of its electronic chess computer in 1979. The first video game to feature speech synthesis was the 1980 shoot 'em up arcade game , Stratovox (known in Japan as Speak & Rescue ), from Sun Electronics . The first personal computer game with speech synthesis
10268-469: The 2008 season, three different teams received their sponsorship under Good Smile Racing, and turned their cars to Vocaloid-related artwork: As well as involvements with the GT series, Crypton also established the website Piapro. A number of games starting from Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA were produced by Sega under license using Hatsune Miku and other Crypton Vocaloids, as well as "fan made" Vocaloids. Later,
10419-550: The GT300 class of the Super GT since 2008 with the support of Good Smile Racing (a branch of Good Smile Company , mainly in charge of car-related products, especially itasha (cars featuring illustrations of anime-styled characters) stickers). Although Good Smile Company was not the first to bring the anime and manga culture to Super GT, it departs from others by featuring itasha directly rather than colorings onto vehicles. Since
10570-536: The Good Smiling racing promotions that Crypton Future Media Vocaloids had played part in, the album Hatsune Miku GT Project Theme Song Collection was released in August 2011 as part of a collaboration. In the month prior to her release, SF-A2 Miki was featured in the album Vocaloids X'mas: Shiroi Yoru wa Seijaku o Mamotteru as part of her promotion. The album featured the Vocaloid singing Christmas songs . Miki
10721-517: The INFO chunk. In addition, WAV files can embed any kind of metadata, including but not limited to Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) data or ID3 tags in extra chunks. The RIFF specification requires that applications ignore chunks they do not recognize and applications may not necessarily use this extra information. Uncompressed WAV files are large, so file sharing of WAV files over the Internet
10872-463: The Japanese spaceport Tanegashima Space Center , having three plates depicting Hatsune Miku. The Vocaloid software has also had a great influence on the character Black Rock Shooter , which looks like Hatsune Miku but is not linked to her by design. The character was made famous by the song "Black Rock Shooter", and a number of figurines have been made. An original video animation made by Ordet
11023-550: The NAMM event in 2007 and Tonio having been announced at the NAMM event in 2009. A customized, Chinese version of Sonika was released at the Fancy Frontier Develop Animation Festival, as well as with promotional versions with stickers and posters. Sanrio held a booth at Comiket 78 featuring the voice of an unreleased Vocaloid. AH-Software in cooperation with Sanrio shared a booth and the event
11174-482: The Score Editor and directly sends these messages to the Synthesis Engine. Yamaha started development of Vocaloid in March 2000 and announced it for the first time at the German fair Musikmesse on March 5–9, 2003. It was created under the name "Daisy", in reference to the song " Daisy Bell ", but for copyright reasons this name was dropped in favor of "Vocaloid". Vocaloid 2 was announced in 2007. Unlike
11325-472: The TTS system has been tuned. However, maximum naturalness typically require unit-selection speech databases to be very large, in some systems ranging into the gigabytes of recorded data, representing dozens of hours of speech. Also, unit selection algorithms have been known to select segments from a place that results in less than ideal synthesis (e.g. minor words become unclear) even when a better choice exists in
11476-486: The Vocaloid 2 system are the Score Editor (Vocaloid 2 Editor), the Singer Library, and the Synthesis Engine. The Synthesis Engine receives score information from the Score Editor, selects appropriate samples from the Singer Library, and concatenates them to output synthesized voices. There is basically no difference in the Score Editor and the Synthesis Engine provided by Yamaha among different Vocaloid 2 products. If
11627-470: The Vocaloid compilations, Exit Tunes Presents Vocalogenesis feat. Hatsune Miku , debuted at No. 1 on the Japanese weekly Oricon albums chart in May 2010, becoming the first Vocaloid album ever to top the charts. The album sold 23,000 copies in its first week and eventually sold 86,000 copies. The following released album, Exit Tunes Presents Vocalonexus feat. Hatsune Miku , became the second Vocaloid album to top
11778-583: The WAV format supports compressed audio using the Audio Compression Manager (ACM). Any ACM codec can be used to compress a WAV file. The user interface (UI) for ACM may be accessed through various programs that use it, including Sound Recorder in some versions of Windows. Beginning with Windows 2000 , a WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE header was defined which specifies multiple audio channel data along with speaker positions, eliminates ambiguity regarding sample types and container sizes in
11929-717: The acoustic patterns of speech in the form of a spectrogram back into sound. Using this device, Alvin Liberman and colleagues discovered acoustic cues for the perception of phonetic segments (consonants and vowels). The first computer-based speech-synthesis systems originated in the late 1950s. Noriko Umeda et al. developed the first general English text-to-speech system in 1968, at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Japan. In 1961, physicist John Larry Kelly, Jr and his colleague Louis Gerstman used an IBM 704 computer to synthesize speech, an event among
12080-451: The actual samples in the format previously specified. Note that the WAV file definition does not show where an INFO chunk should be placed. It is also silent about the placement of a CSET chunk (which specifies the character set used). The RIFF specification attempts to be a formal specification, but its formalism lacks the precision seen in other tagged formats. For example, the RIFF specification does not clearly distinguish between
12231-585: The albums Sakura no Ame ( 桜ノ雨 ) by Absorb and Miku no Kanzume ( みくのかんづめ ) by OSTER-project. Kagamine Len and Rin's songs were covered by Asami Shimoda in the album Prism credited to "Kagamine Rin/Len feat. Asami Shimoda". The compilation album Vocarock Collection 2 feat. Hatsune Miku was released by Farm Records on December 15, 2010, and was later featured on the Cool Japan Music iPhone app in February 2011. The record label Balloom became
12382-522: The backing of Dr. Seiichi Sakamoto of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The website of the petition written in Japanese was translated into other languages such as English, Russian , Chinese and Korean, and, the petition exceeded the needed 10,000 signatures necessary to have the plates made on December 22, 2009. On May 21, 2010, at 06:58:22 ( JST ), Akatsuki was launched on the rocket H-IIA 202 Flight 17 from
12533-511: The car. The launch of the car also marked the start of Miku's debut in the US alongside it. Crypton had always sold Hatsune Miku as a virtual instrument, but they decided to ask their own fanbase in Japan if it was okay with them to market her to the United States as a virtual singer instead. The largest promotional event for Vocaloids is "The Voc@loid M@ster" (Vom@s) convention held four times
12684-512: The characters in noncommercial adaptations and derivations with attribution. Speech synthesis Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech . A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer , and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech ( TTS ) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech. The reverse process
12835-412: The combinations of words and phrases with which they have been preprogrammed. The blending of words within naturally spoken language however can still cause problems unless the many variations are taken into account. For example, in non-rhotic dialects of English the "r" in words like "clear" /ˈklɪə/ is usually only pronounced when the following word has a vowel as its first letter (e.g. "clear out"
12986-509: The creativity of their user base, preferring to let their user base to have freedom to create PV's without restrictions. Initially, Crypton Future Media were the only studio that was allowed the license of figurines to be produced for their Vocaloids. A number of figurines and plush dolls were also released under license to Max Factory and the Good Smile Company of Crypton's Vocaloids. Among these figures were also Figma models of
13137-478: The database. Recently, researchers have proposed various automated methods to detect unnatural segments in unit-selection speech synthesis systems. Diphone synthesis uses a minimal speech database containing all the diphones (sound-to-sound transitions) occurring in a language. The number of diphones depends on the phonotactics of the language: for example, Spanish has about 800 diphones, and German about 2500. In diphone synthesis, only one example of each diphone
13288-666: The development of the freeware UTAU . Several products were produced for the Macne series ( Mac音シリーズ ) for intended use for the programs Reason 4 and GarageBand . These products were sold by Act2 and by converting their file format, were able to also work with the UTAU program. The program Maidloid, developed for the character Acme Iku ( 阿久女イク ) , was also developed, which works in a similar way to Vocaloid, except produces erotic sounds rather than an actual singing voice. Other than Vocaloid, AH-Software also developed Tsukuyomi Ai and Shouta for
13439-509: The entire "Character Vocal Series" mascots as well as Nendoroid figures of various Crypton Vocaloids and variants. Pullip versions of Hatsune Miku, Kagamine Len and Rin have also been produced for release in April 2011; other Vocaloid dolls have since been announced from the Pullip doll line. As part of promotions for Vocaloid Lily, license for a figurine was given to Phat Company and Lily became
13590-469: The events of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami , a number of Vocaloid related donation drives were produced. Crypton Future Media joined several other companies in a donation drive, with money spent on the sales of music from Crypton Future Media's KarenT label being donated to the Japanese Red Cross . In addition, a special Nendoroid of Hatsune Miku, Nendoroid Hatsune Miku: Support ver.,
13741-447: The festival. Videos of her performance are due to be released worldwide. Megpoid and Gackpoid were also featured in the 2010 King Run Anison Red and White concert. This event also used the same projector method to display Megpoid and Gackpoid on a large screen. Their appearance at the concert was done as a one-time event and both Vocaloids were featured singing a song originally sung by their respective voice provider. The next live concert
13892-402: The first engine, Vocaloid 2 based its results on vocal samples, rather than analysis of the human voice. The synthesis engine and the user interface were completely revamped, with Japanese Vocaloids possessing a Japanese interface. Vocaloid 3 launched on October 21, 2011, along with several products in Japanese, the first of its kind. Several studios updated their Vocaloid 2 products for use with
14043-590: The first label to focus solely on Vocaloid-related works and their first release was Unhappy Refrain by the Vocaloid producer Wowaka . Hatsune Miku's North American debut song "World is Mine" ranked at No. 7 in the iTunes world singles ranking in the week of its release. Singer Gackt also challenged Gackpoid users to create a song, with the prize being 10 million yen, stating if the song was to his liking he would sing and include it in his next album. The winning song " Episode 0 " and runner up song "Paranoid Doll" were later released by Gackt on July 13, 2011. In relation to
14194-513: The first non-Crypton Vocaloid to receive a figurine. With regard to the English Vocaloid studios, Power FX's Sweet Ann was given her own MySpace page and Sonika her own Twitter account. In comparison to Japanese studios, Zero-G and PowerFX maintain a high level of contact with their fans. Zero-G in particular encourages fan feed back and, after adopting Sonika as a mascot for their studio, has run two competitions related to her. There
14345-424: The full-scale range representing ±1 V or A rather than a sound pressure. Audio compact discs (CDs) do not use the WAV file format, using instead Red Book audio . The commonality is that audio CDs are encoded as uncompressed 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo LPCM, which is one of the formats supported by WAV. Audio in WAV files can be encoded in a variety of audio coding formats, such as GSM or MP3 , to reduce
14496-507: The future. Crypton plans to start an electronic magazine for English readers at the end of 2010 in order to encourage the growth of the English Vocaloid fanbase. Extracts of PowerFX's Sweet Ann and Big Al were included in Soundation Studio in their Christmas loops and sound release with a competition included. Crypton and Toyota began working together to promote the launch of the 2011 Toyota Corolla using Hatsune Miku to promote
14647-425: The greatest naturalness, because it applies only a small amount of digital signal processing (DSP) to the recorded speech. DSP often makes recorded speech sound less natural, although some systems use a small amount of signal processing at the point of concatenation to smooth the waveform. The output from the best unit-selection systems is often indistinguishable from real human voices, especially in contexts for which
14798-563: The human vocal tract and the articulation processes occurring there. The first articulatory synthesizer regularly used for laboratory experiments was developed at Haskins Laboratories in the mid-1970s by Philip Rubin , Tom Baer, and Paul Mermelstein. This synthesizer, known as ASY, was based on vocal tract models developed at Bell Laboratories in the 1960s and 1970s by Paul Mermelstein, Cecil Coker, and colleagues. Until recently, articulatory synthesis models have not been incorporated into commercial speech synthesis systems. A notable exception
14949-569: The marketing of each Vocaloid is left to the respective studios. Yamaha themselves do maintain a degree of promotional efforts in the actual Vocaloid software, as seen when the humanoid robot model HRP-4C of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) was set up to react to three Vocaloids— Hatsune Miku , Megpoid and Crypton's noncommercial Vocaloid software "CV-4Cβ"—as part of promotions for both Yamaha and AIST at CEATEC in 2009. The prototype voice CV-4Cβ
15100-467: The marketing success of those particular voices. After the success of SF-A2 Miki's CD album, other Vocaloids such as VY1 and Iroha have also used promotional CDs as a marketing approach to selling their software. When Amazon MP3 in Japan opened on November 9, 2010, Vocaloid albums were featured as its free-of-charge contents. Crypton has been involved with the marketing of their Character Vocal Series, particularly Hatsune Miku, has been actively involved in
15251-521: The missing roles the software had yet to cover. The album A Place in the Sun was noted to have songs that were designed for a male voice with a rougher timbre than the Vocaloid Leon could provide; this later led to the development of Big Al to fulfill this particular role. Some of the most popular albums are on the Exit Tunes label, featuring the works of Vocaloid producers in Japan. One of
15402-526: The most prominent in the history of Bell Labs . Kelly's voice recorder synthesizer ( vocoder ) recreated the song " Daisy Bell ", with musical accompaniment from Max Mathews . Coincidentally, Arthur C. Clarke was visiting his friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility. Clarke was so impressed by the demonstration that he used it in the climactic scene of his screenplay for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey , where
15553-531: The naturalness of the human voice. Examples of disadvantages of the method are low robustness when the data are not sufficient, lack of controllability and low performance in auto-regressive models. For tonal languages, such as Chinese or Taiwanese language, there are different levels of tone sandhi required and sometimes the output of speech synthesizer may result in the mistakes of tone sandhi. In 2023, VICE reporter Joseph Cox published findings that he had recorded five minutes of himself talking and then used
15704-458: The new engine with improved voice samples. In October 2014, the first product confirmed for the Vocaloid 4 engine was the English vocal Ruby, whose release was delayed so she could be released on the newer engine. In 2015, several V4 versions of Vocaloids were released. The Vocaloid 5 engine was then announced soon afterwards. Vocaloid 5 was released on July 12, 2018, with an overhauled user interface and substantial engine improvements. The product
15855-933: The original 28 chapters serialized in Comic Rush and a collection of the first 10 chapters in a single tankōbon volume. A manga was produced for Lily by Kei Garou, who also drew the mascot. An anime music video titled "Schwarzgazer", which shows the world where Lily is, was produced and it was released with the album anim.o.v.e 02 , however the song is sung by Move , not by Vocaloids. A yonkoma manga based on Hatsune Miku and drawn by Kentaro Hayashi, Shūkan Hajimete no Hatsune Miku! , began serialization in Weekly Young Jump on September 2, 2010. Hatsune Miku appeared in Weekly Playboy magazine. However, Crypton Future Media confirmed they will not be producing an anime based on their Vocaloids as it would limit
16006-467: The promotional effort of their Vocaloid products. The important role Nico Nico Douga has played in promoting the Vocaloids also sparked interest in the software and Kentaro Miura , the artist of Gakupo's mascot design, had offered his services for free because of his love for the website. In September 2009, three figurines based on the derivative character "Hachune Miku" were launched in a rocket from
16157-412: The pronunciation of a word based on its spelling , a process which is often called text-to-phoneme or grapheme -to-phoneme conversion ( phoneme is the term used by linguists to describe distinctive sounds in a language ). The simplest approach to text-to-phoneme conversion is the dictionary-based approach, where a large dictionary containing all the words of a language and their correct pronunciations
16308-491: The recognition and popularity of the software grew, Nico Nico Douga became a place for collaborative content creation. Popular original songs written by a user would generate illustrations, animation in 2D and 3D , and remixes by other users. Other creators would show their unfinished work and ask for ideas. The software has also been used to tell stories using song and verse and the Story of Evil series has become so popular that
16459-514: The release of Vocaloid in 2004, although this name is no longer used since the release of Vocaloid 2 in 2007. " Singing Articulation " is explained as "vocal expressions" such as vibrato and vocal fragments necessary for singing. The Vocaloid and Vocaloid 2 synthesis engines are designed for singing, not reading text aloud, though software such as Vocaloid-flex and Voiceroid have been developed for that. They cannot naturally replicate singing expressions like hoarse voices or shouts. The main parts of
16610-507: The release of Crypton Future Media's Hatsune Miku Vocaloid 2 software and her success has led to the popularity of the Vocaloid software in general. Japanese video sharing website Niconico played a fundamental role in the recognition and popularity of the software. A user of Hatsune Miku and an illustrator released a much-viewed video, in which "Hachune Miku", a super deformed Miku, held a Welsh onion ( Negi in Japanese), which resembles
16761-403: The required training time and enabling the model to learn and generalize shared emotional context, even for voices with no exposure to such emotional context. The deep learning model used by the application is nondeterministic : each time that speech is generated from the same string of text, the intonation of the speech will be slightly different. The application also supports manually altering
16912-512: The robotic-sounding nature of formant synthesis, and has few of the advantages of either approach other than small size. As such, its use in commercial applications is declining, although it continues to be used in research because there are a number of freely available software implementations. An early example of Diphone synthesis is a teaching robot, Leachim , that was invented by Michael J. Freeman . Leachim contained information regarding class curricular and certain biographical information about
17063-524: The rule-based method extensively, resorting to dictionaries only for those few words, like foreign names and loanwords, whose pronunciations are not obvious from their spellings. On the other hand, speech synthesis systems for languages like English, which have extremely irregular spelling systems, are more likely to rely on dictionaries, and to use rule-based methods only for unusual words, or words that are not in their dictionaries. The consistent evaluation of speech synthesis systems may be difficult because of
17214-665: The same year. In 1976, Computalker Consultants released their CT-1 Speech Synthesizer. Designed by D. Lloyd Rice and Jim Cooper, it was an analog synthesizer built to work with microcomputers using the S-100 bus standard. Early electronic speech-synthesizers sounded robotic and were often barely intelligible. The quality of synthesized speech has steadily improved, but as of 2016 output from contemporary speech synthesis systems remains clearly distinguishable from actual human speech. Synthesized voices typically sounded male until 1990, when Ann Syrdal , at AT&T Bell Laboratories , created
17365-401: The sample data that follows. This chunk includes information such as the sample encoding, number of bits per channel, the number of channels, and the sample rate. The WAV specification includes some optional features. The optional <fact-ck> chunk reports the number of samples for some compressed coding schemes. The <cue-ck> chunk identifies some significant sample numbers in
17516-409: The script of the required words. It uses synthesizing technology with specially recorded vocals of voice actors or singers. To create a song, the user must input the melody and lyrics. A piano roll type interface is used to input the melody and the lyrics can be entered on each note. The software can change the stress of the pronunciations, add effects such as vibrato, or change the dynamics and tone of
17667-412: The software Voiceroid , and the sale of their Vocaloids gave AH-Software the chance to promote Voiceroid at the same time. The software is aimed for speaking rather than singing. Both AH-Software's Vocaloids and Voiceroids went on sale on December 4, 2009. Crypton Future Media has been reported to openly welcome these additional software developments as it expands the market for synthesized voices. During
17818-658: The software also have stalls at the events. The very first live concert related to Vocaloid was held in 2004 with the Vocaloid Miriam in Russia. Vocaloids have also been promoted at events such as the NAMM show and the Musikmesse fair. In fact, it was the promotion of Zero-G's Lola and Leon at the NAMM trade show that would later introduce PowerFX to the Vocaloid program. These events have also become an opportunity for announcing new Vocaloids with Prima being announced at
17969-468: The standard WAV format and supports defining custom extensions to the format. A RIFF file is a tagged file format. It has a specific container format (a chunk ) with a header that includes a four-character tag ( FourCC ) and the size (number of bytes) of the chunk. The tag specifies how the data within the chunk should be interpreted, and there are several standard FourCC tags. Tags consisting of all capital letters are reserved tags. The outermost chunk of
18120-811: The start of the San Francisco tour where the first Hatsune Miku concert was hosted in North America on September 18, 2010, featuring songs provided by the Miku software voice. A second screening of the concert was on October 11, 2010, in the San Francisco Viz Cinema. A screening of the concert was also shown in New York City in the city's anime festival . Hiroyuki Ito, and planner/producer, Wataru Sasaki, who were responsible for Miku's creation, attended an event on October 8, 2010, at
18271-454: The students whom it was programmed to teach. It was tested in a fourth grade classroom in the Bronx, New York . Domain-specific synthesis concatenates prerecorded words and phrases to create complete utterances. It is used in applications where the variety of texts the system will output is limited to a particular domain, like transit schedule announcements or weather reports. The technology
18422-508: The symbolic linguistic representation into sound. In certain systems, this part includes the computation of the target prosody (pitch contour, phoneme durations), which is then imposed on the output speech. Long before the invention of electronic signal processing , some people tried to build machines to emulate human speech. Some early legends of the existence of " Brazen Heads " involved Pope Silvester II (d. 1003 AD), Albertus Magnus (1198–1280), and Roger Bacon (1214–1294). In 1779,
18573-563: The synthesized speech output is created using additive synthesis and an acoustic model ( physical modelling synthesis ). Parameters such as fundamental frequency , voicing , and noise levels are varied over time to create a waveform of artificial speech. This method is sometimes called rules-based synthesis ; however, many concatenative systems also have rules-based components. Many systems based on formant synthesis technology generate artificial, robotic-sounding speech that would never be mistaken for human speech. However, maximum naturalness
18724-559: The synthesized tune when creating voices. This editor supports ReWire and can be synchronized with DAW. Real-time "playback" of songs with predefined lyrics using a MIDI keyboard is also supported. Each Vocaloid license develops the Singer Library, or a database of vocal fragments sampled from real people. The database must have all possible combinations of phonemes of the target language, including diphones (a chain of two different phonemes) and sustained vowels, as well as polyphones with more than two phonemes if necessary. For example,
18875-405: The text into prosodic units , like phrases , clauses , and sentences . The process of assigning phonetic transcriptions to words is called text-to-phoneme or grapheme -to-phoneme conversion. Phonetic transcriptions and prosody information together make up the symbolic linguistic representation that is output by the front-end. The back-end—often referred to as the synthesizer —then converts
19026-474: The two songs for use with her program. A number of Vocaloid related music, including songs starring Hatsune Miku, were featured in the arcade game Music Gun Gun! 2 . One of the rare singles with the English speaking Sonika, "Suburban Taxi", was released by Alexander Stein and the German label Volume0dB on March 11, 2010. To celebrate the release of the Vocaloid 3 software, a compilation album titled The Vocaloids
19177-447: The units in the speech database is then created based on the segmentation and acoustic parameters like the fundamental frequency ( pitch ), duration, position in the syllable, and neighboring phones. At run time , the desired target utterance is created by determining the best chain of candidate units from the database (unit selection). This process is typically achieved using a specially weighted decision tree . Unit selection provides
19328-496: The vocoder, Homer Dudley developed a keyboard-operated voice-synthesizer called The Voder (Voice Demonstrator), which he exhibited at the 1939 New York World's Fair . Dr. Franklin S. Cooper and his colleagues at Haskins Laboratories built the Pattern playback in the late 1940s and completed it in 1950. There were several different versions of this hardware device; only one currently survives. The machine converts pictures of
19479-588: The voice corresponding to the word "sing" ([sIN]) can be synthesized by concatenating the sequence of diphones "#-s, s-I, I-N, N-#" (# indicating a voiceless phoneme) with the sustained vowel ī. The Vocaloid system changes the pitch of these fragments so that it fits the melody. In order to get more natural sounds, three or four different pitch ranges are required to be stored into the library. Japanese requires 500 diphones per pitch, whereas English requires 2,500. Japanese has fewer diphones because it has fewer phonemes and most syllabic sounds are open syllables ending in
19630-433: The voice. Various voice banks have been released for use with the Vocaloid synthesizer technology. Each is sold as "a singer in a box" designed to act as a replacement for an actual singer. As such, they are released under a moe anthropomorphism . These avatars are also referred to as Vocaloids , and are often marketed as virtual idols ; some have gone on to perform at live concerts as an on-stage projection. The software
19781-400: The wave file. The <playlist-ck> chunk allows the samples to be played out of order or repeated rather than just from beginning to end. The associated data list ( <assoc-data-list> ) allows labels and notes to be attached to cue points; text annotation may be given for a group of samples (e.g., caption information). Finally, the mandatory <wave-data> chunk contains
19932-591: The weekly charts in January 2011. Another album, Supercell , by the group Supercell also features a number of songs using Vocaloids. Upon its release in North America, it became ranked as the second highest album on Amazon's bestselling MP3 album in the international category in the United States and topped the store's bestselling chart for world music on iTunes. Other albums, such as 19's Sound Factory's First Sound Story and Livetune 's Re:Repackage , and Re:Mikus also feature Miku's voice. Other uses of Miku include
20083-446: The word "in", and the address "12 St John St." uses the same abbreviation for both "Saint" and "Street". TTS systems with intelligent front ends can make educated guesses about ambiguous abbreviations, while others provide the same result in all cases, resulting in nonsensical (and sometimes comical) outputs, such as " Ulysses S. Grant " being rendered as "Ulysses South Grant". Speech synthesis systems use two basic approaches to determine
20234-586: The work done in the late 1970s for the Texas Instruments toy Speak & Spell , and in the early 1980s Sega arcade machines and in many Atari, Inc. arcade games using the TMS5220 LPC Chips . Creating proper intonation for these projects was painstaking, and the results have yet to be matched by real-time text-to-speech interfaces. Articulatory synthesis consists of computational techniques for synthesizing speech based on models of
20385-466: Was Manbiki Shoujo ( Shoplifting Girl ), released in 1980 for the PET 2001 , for which the game's developer, Hiroshi Suzuki, developed a " zero cross " programming technique to produce a synthesized speech waveform. Another early example, the arcade version of Berzerk , also dates from 1980. The Milton Bradley Company produced the first multi-player electronic game using voice synthesis, Milton , in
20536-484: Was also featured on an event as a part of the 62nd Sapporo Snow Festival in February 2011. A Vocaloid-themed TV show on the Japanese Vocaloids called Vocalo Revolution began airing on Kyoto Broadcasting System on January 3, 2011. The show is part of a bid to make the Vocaloid culture more widely accepted and features a mascot known as "Cul", also mascot of the "Cul Project". The show's first success story
20687-484: Was also featured singing the introduction of the game Hello Kitty to Issho! Block Crash 123!! . A young female prototype used for the "project if..." series was used in Sound Horizon 's musical work "Ido e Itaru Mori e Itaru Ido", labeled as the "prologue maxi". The prototype sang alongside Miku for their music and is known only by the name "Junger März_Prototype β". For Yamaha's VY1 Vocaloid, an album featuring VY1
20838-472: Was also talk from PowerFX of redoing their Sweet Ann box art and a competition would be included as part of the redesign. The Vocaloid Lily also had a competition held during her trial period. English Vocaloids have not sold enough to warrant extras, such as seen with Crypton's Miku Append. However, it has been confirmed if the English Vocaloids become more popular, then Appends would be an option in
20989-586: Was announced with a donation of 1,000 yen per sale to the Japanese Red Cross. In addition to the donation drives held by Crypton Future Media, AH-Software created the Voiceroid voicebank Tohoku Zunko to promote the recovery of the Tōhoku region and its culture. In 2012, Vocaloid was quoted as one of the contributors to a 10% increase in cosplay related services. In 2013, the Vocaloid 3 software Oliver
21140-477: Was created by sampling a Japanese voice actress, Eriko Nakamura. Japanese magazines such as DTM magazine are responsible for the promotion and introduction for many of the Japanese Vocaloids to Japanese Vocaloid fans. It has featured Vocaloids such as Hatsune Miku, Kagamine Rin and Len , and Megurine Luka , printing some sketches by artist Kei Garou and reporting the latest Vocaloid news. Thirty-day trial versions of Miriam, Lily and Iroha have also contributed to
21291-465: Was created. The album was released with the deluxe version of the program. It includes various well-known producers from Nico Nico Douga and YouTube and includes covers of various popular and well-known Vocaloid songs using the VY1 product. The first press edition of Nekomura Iroha was released with a CD containing her two sample songs "Tsubasa" and "Abbey Fly", and the install disc also contained VSQ files of
21442-493: Was featured in the album 32bit Love by Muzehack and Lola in Operator's Manual by anaROBIK; both were featured in these albums six years after they were released. Even early on in the software's history, the music making progress proved to be a valuable asset to the Vocaloid development as it not only opened up the possibilities of how the software may be applied in practice, but led to the creation of further Vocaloids to fill in
21593-623: Was opened at the Zepp Tokyo in Odaiba , Tokyo. The tour was run as part of promotions for Sega's Hatsune Miku: Project Diva video game in March 2010. The success and possibility of these tours is owed to the popularity of Hatsune Miku and so far Crypton is the only studio to have established a world tour of their Vocaloids. Later, the CEO of Crypton Future Media appeared in San Francisco at
21744-415: Was originally considered as an internet underground culture , but with a decade of social change, it has become a popular musical genre. The earliest use of Vocaloid-related software used prototypes of Kaito and Meiko and were featured on the album History of Logic System by Hideki Matsutake released on July 24, 2003, and sang the song "Ano Subarashii Ai o Mō Ichido". The first album to be released using
21895-988: Was originally only available in English starting with the first Vocaloids Leon, Lola and Miriam by Zero-G , and Japanese with Meiko and Kaito made by Yamaha and sold by Crypton Future Media . Vocaloid 3 has added support for Spanish for the Vocaloids Bruno, Clara and Maika; Chinese for Luo Tianyi , Yuezheng Ling , Xin Hua and Yanhe ; and Korean for SeeU . The software is intended for professional musicians as well as casual computer music users. Japanese musical groups such as Livetune of Toy's Factory and Supercell of Sony Music Entertainment Japan have released their songs featuring Vocaloid as vocals. Japanese record label Exit Tunes of Quake Inc. also have released compilation albums featuring Vocaloids. Vocaloid's singing synthesis [ ja ] technology
22046-557: Was released. The CD contains 18 songs sung by Vocaloids released in Japan and contains a booklet with information about the Vocaloid characters. Porter Robinson used the Vocaloid Avanna for his studio album Worlds . Yamaha utilized Vocaloid technology to mimic the voice of deceased rock musician hide , who died in 1998, to complete and release his song " Co Gal " in 2014. The musician's actual voice, breathing sounds and other cues were extracted from previously released songs and
22197-602: Was set for Tokyo on March 9, 2011. Other events included the Vocarock Festival 2011 on January 11, 2011, and the Vocaloid Festa which was held on February 12, 2011. The Vocaloid Festa had also hosted a competition officially endorsed by Pixiv , with the winner seeing their creation unveiled at Vocafes2 on May 29, 2011. The first Vocaloid concert in North America was held in Los Angeles on July 2, 2011, at
22348-491: Was streamed for free as part of a promotional campaign running from June 25 to August 31, 2010. The virtual idols "Meaw" have also been released aimed at the Vocaloid culture. The twin Thai virtual idols released two singles, "Meaw Left ver." and "Meaw Right ver.", sung in Japanese. A cafe for one day only was opened in Tokyo based on Hatsune Miku on August 31, 2010. A second event was arranged for all Japanese Vocaloids. "Snow Miku"
22499-702: Was therefore created for use in Sound Forge . Its 64-bit file size field in the header allows for much longer recording times. The RF64 format specified by the European Broadcasting Union has also been created to solve this problem. Since the sampling rate of a WAV file can vary from 1 Hz to 4.3 GHz , and the number of channels can be as high as 65535, WAV files have also been used for non-audio data. LTspice , for instance, can store multiple circuit trace waveforms in separate channels, at any appropriate sampling rate, with
22650-580: Was used as the voice of Cartoon Hangover character PuppyCat from their web series Bee and PuppyCat . In 2023, a Pokémon collaboration was announced and released. Named Project VOLTAGE , it consists of art of Hatsune Miku as different Pokémon type trainers. The art was drawn by 6 different artists, some of which are prominent artists for the Pokémon Trading Card Game . After the release of all 18 Pokémon type artworks, songs by 18 different producers were released. Vocaloid music
22801-704: Was used to advertise both the Hello Kitty game and AH-Software's new Vocaloid. At the Nico Nico Douga Daikaigi 2010 Summer: Egao no Chikara event, Internet Co., Ltd. announced their latest Vocaloid "Gachapoid" based on popular children's character Gachapin. Originally, Hiroyuki Ito—President of Crypton Future Media—claimed that Hatsune Miku was not a virtual idol but a kind of the Virtual Studio Technology instrument. However, Hatsune Miku performed her first "live" concert like
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