i turned myself into an utau
2023年6月20日
I suddenly discovered Vocaloid on YouTube when I was in 6th grade, which led to a memorable school trip when I literally spammed four (4) songs on repeat. At the time it felt like Miku, Len, Rin, Kaito and Luka were the popular ones, at least those are the ones that I seem to remember most distinctly.
Now guess what I did when I learned that anyone could turn themself into a Vocaloid. Of course I had to see what that was about, even if it was 8-9 years later as an adult. Haha cringe I guess, whatever. I could argue it was an academic exercise partially motivated by a class I took at UChicago. That isn’t wrong, but to be honest I was kinda bored in the summertime and curious if I could make it happen.
Now to be precise, I didn’t turn myself into a Vocaloid – because Vocaloid is proprietary™. Rather, I recorded my own voice to build a Japanese consonant-vowel (CV) voice bank which is then used in a vocal synthesizer software called UTAU (歌う).
As someone who doesn’t really know much Japanese, after this setup now my voice can be used to “sing” Japanese.
Honestly I did not figure out how to actually use the software to create lyrics / music / a song and I definitely did not know how to do tuning either (i.e. make the resulting singing voice sound more natural), but luckily there are many creators of UTAU Sequence Text (UST) files on YouTube which allow you to use your personal voicebank to synthesize the singing. After combining the synthesized output with the proper backing track, you now have a UTAU cover.
I tried finding one that would work with my voicebank, and of course it had to be Bad Apple.
Maybe I will one day revisit this project to create my own song with my voicebank, or maybe I can try out some of the more modern stuff.
Disclaimer: All credit for music, music video and UST goes to the original creators, this is a derivative work. Specifically, the voicebank was developed myself.
Citations: