These are Rin and Len Kagamine, the twins from the latest Vocaloid installment. I hope they will eventually release all the voice banks outside of Japan, because I'd like to get my hands on that software one day; in the meantime I'll just oogle the pretty character designs.
Maybe they'll release an english version with a real boy and girl voic e actors instead of forcing a square peg into a round hole :p
ReplyDeleteBut darn these Japanese! They're running while everybody else is just crawling :( Why can't Microsoft bundle something like this with windows? That would be a great feature.
What the h..., that's voice-technology? That's really hard indeed, ouch. No wonder I'd like to go to that crazy country someday ^.^v
ReplyDelete*really* nice art by the way, :) I hope you won't mind me taking a sneak peak on your techniques when I have character design this second semester... (Don't worry, I don't steal art, I just look at how things are drawn)
There actually is an English version of the software that you can find by digging around Yamaha's site. Unfortunately, there are no anime ties and no sugary sweet kid voice actors. Just a generic male and female sound bank.
ReplyDeleteBut part of the reason Vocaloid is so compelling is that Japanese lends itself to the concept. Since Japanese is built on a syllabic language where there are a finite number of possible sounds, it's relatively simple to assign each syllable to specific notes and pitches. English, on the other hand, contains such an extended wealth of vocal possibilities that almost any synthesizer program struggles with it and ends up sounding terribly synthetic at best. Unsurprisingly, that's the case with the English software I mentioned above.
But either way, art is totally awesome as always, Niko. I especially like Rin, but then again, that's hardly surprising. :)