KIC: VOCALOID - 1.A

 Image from Safebooru

1. Vocaloid - What is it?
   Vocaloid is a Singing Synthesizer developed byYamaha. Hatsune Miku, and all the other Vocaloid characters (well most of them) are voice packages released by other companies, using the Vocaloid Engine.
 
This video should answer many many questions. If it's not enough, then I'll provide the rest of the answers.




A. Fundementals 

a. Developers
Yamaha developed the synthesizing engine, which acts are the core of the program. 

Crypton Future Media leads the Vocaloid scene, releasing five voice packages, Meiko, Kaito, Hatsune Miku, the Kagamine twins, and Megurine Luka. Meiko and Kaito use the VOCALOID engine, while Miku and packages after her use the VOCALOID2 engine, an upgrade from the older engine.


Internet Co. Ltd. has also released it's own two packages, Kamui Gackupo, and Gumi. While having less packages released, they are by no means inferior to Crypton's packages. Internet Co. uses voice samplings from professional singers, Gackt and Nakajima Megumi (Ranka Lee), respectively, for their packages.

Western Vocaloid Releases


PowerFX released two packages, Big-Al, and Sweet Ann. Not much is actually known about these, although Sweet Ann was the first to use the new VOCALOID2 engine (yes, she was released a month before Miku was)


Zero-G released five packages; Leon, Lola, Miriam, Prima and Sonika. Aside from Prima and Sonika, all of Zero-G's packages use the older VOCALOID engine.


b. Use
For the most part, to use any of the Vocaloid programs, you have to put the melody and lyrics in. Using the program, you can change how much stress is put onto a syllable, the pitch and other aspects of singing. If you are using the program, you're under the company's terms of license, which, essentially, restrict you from using the program to create music intended to be sold for profit without the consent of the company. 

c. NND
NND stands for Nico Nico Douga, a popular video sharing web site, similar to YouTube. Vocaloid activity centers around this website, as almost all songs using any of the Vocaloid characters will usually turn up on Nico Nico first, before spreading around the internet. 


NND also has remastered versions of popular songs, sung by users of the site. を歌うとこうなりました means "I tried to sing" or something along those lines. There are many users who have done vocal covers of popular Vocaloid songs. Such users are Clear, Usa, Halyosy, etc. Note that Halyosy is also the vocalist of the professional band, absorb. He is also known for doing covers (with or without his band) of Vocaloid songs. He also produced a popular song. I'll do another KIC for NND singers alone in the future. There's so many of them.