[animeweedlord]

The vast majority of popular Vocaloid music is created by the fans themselves, not "Japanese businessmen." In fact, the kneejerk reaction is completely backwards: regular human idols and pop stars are the fake, focus tested machinations of businessmen. Vocaloids are a pure representation of the feelings of regular people. The pop song on the radio was designed and marketed to appeal to a certain audience by people that probably hate what they're creating, acted out by a human puppet. The equivalent Vocaloid song was made by someone that really wanted to write a song about love or loneliness or saccharine positivity or whatever. Ordinary (but talented) people living their dreams through a collective consciousness.

From my perspective, it seems strange that anyone enjoyed the "real" thing in the first place.

[Retric]

Bull. These things are not created by a single person.

For a more western example Toy Story 3 might have been a moving story, but it's no single persons vision given form. Instead it's the passion from many distilled into it's most marketable form.

[alexvoda]

Are you claiming the songs are not made by individual persons? I know such song writers personally. It's not that big of a deal to create a song an put it on Youtube.

I don't really get why you are comparing it to Toy Story.

[Retric]

The song is just a small part. With human pop stars and Animation you at least get a human's take on some music. But, here the voice is synthesized from several people and effects, the motion are all re-rendered and refined based on feedback from multiple people etc etc.

Yes, it's voice sounds interesting, but it completely lacks emotion. So, the show ends up even more fake than Animation which still relies on traditional voice actors.

[alexvoda]

I think you are misunderstanding something. And also assuming a lot more is going on than it actually is.

First of all, the songs are the main part. All of the rest is just secondary. You can not talk about anything related to Vocaloids without talking about the voice synthesis software, the voice banks and the songs using them.

Secondly, most animations that may or may not accompany songs are little more than slide shows with moving elements on the screen. Many songs don't even have that. Many only have a picture.

Thirdly, out of the songs that become very popular, some get fan made choreographies. In this process, motion capture using a Kinekt helps a lot, but you need to do fine tuning for a smooth result.

Each of these steps is within the realm of what a single very dedicated person can do.

Also, there is no such thing "the voice is synthesized from several people and effects" . Each voice bank has a single donor. And you can purchase the Vocaloid software and voice banks and use them without restrictions.

Sure, if you want to make a concert and charge for tickets, you might do the choreography part more professionally and use fancy projection technology, so people actually have a reason to pay for those tickets. Otherwise people can just compile a concert themselves and project it in their homes. I did just that for my family to explain the phenomenon to them.

As for your last paragraph, I don't think I can convince you something fictional is not "fake". You shouldn't expect animation to look real because that is not the point of animation. As for lacking emotion, I bet you have not heard songs that try to do just that instead of being gimmicky. Try this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BFvN-idN1s This was made by just two people. One did the music and lyrics, the other the illustration and video.

[Retric]

I am not going to comment on the animation, or song in your link. Just the 'voice' which has zero emotional range.

There is an intresting recent study that used really short clips of people laughing and asked: "Are they friends?" This is just laughter and it was played for people around the globe. People did better than random. Not 100% by any means but well past random change for a few seconds of laughter.

Now, extend this emotional void to a full song and it get's down right creepy.

[alexvoda]

I understand what you are saying. I guess not all of are are affected by this. I guess at this point it's subjective. I understand why you might feel it's creepy.

As for the study, I believe you are referring to this: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/friends-or-not-laughter-re... I have not read the article but I listened to the sound clips. They are definitely different. But I do not associate either with friends or strangers. If it were just these 2 clips I would probably identify them correctly because one is more involved and energetic and I know there is one of each kind. But I would probably find it more difficult to identify the type of each clip from a set without any extra knowledge.

[Mithaldu]

> Yes, it's voice sounds interesting, but it completely lacks emotion.

That is a highly subjective judgement call, and i think i even know why it appears like that to you. Different languages express emotions differently, and particularly japanese appears "flat" to english people, to the point that english learners of japanese are taught to speak japanese like a robot to sound somewhat accurate.

Luckily there are some people making english songs with vocaloids as well. Have a listen to those and see if you get more out of them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQKGUgOfD8U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Skij_GE9n4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmifuQvFu8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfQShttQTd0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1xicOvYd3Q

[Retric]

That was far worse, IMO. The last song should be highly emotional, but the stresses where in completely the wrong places.

The closet thing I could think of was how being readers can say words without understanding their meaning. The stresses follow the difficulty they are having not the content of a story. If you hear them speaking you can follow their emotional responses, or hear the words, but doing both set's up dissonance. Listen to 0:40 to 1:00 here and I think you can get what I mean. https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/guided-reading-introd...

PS: While I don't think this is any more subjective than body language, the negative reaction might go away if I listened to a lot of this stuff. A speak and spell quickly goes from odd to just that's how it sounds.

[Mithaldu]

Here's the fun thing: You picked up a crucial part of Luka perfectly. She's a japanese vocaloid. Due to the way vocaloids are made each one has to be specialized for a certain language, with japanese ones often being able to be good with 100-200 samples, and english ones easily going to 1000+ samples.

Making an english song with english vocaloids is tricky to begin with due to the differences in language favoring japanese heavily for synthesis. Making an english song with a native japanese vocaloid is even harder, and the result is what you hear in "Lie". (You can also contrast this with "Last of Me", which was made with a recent upgrade on Luka, V4X, who can speak english and works out better; and of course the three Gumi songs, since Gumi is a natively english vocaloid who does quite well.)

In short: Yeah, you did accurately identify a foreigner speaking english slightly awkwardly.

As for the getting used to, yes, you get used to it, however that's not because you get used to vocaloids themselves, but because you get used to japanese songs, which feature vowel frequencies, vowel distribution patterns and rhythms in expression that are flat out alien to english speakers. This works out as "exotic and interesting" to some and "weird and off" to others. To give a more clear example, try and see if this song, which to to speakers of languages with similarity to latin vowels (germanic, slavic, chinese, japanese) sounds flat out beautiful, but is mostly "meh" to americans i found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCDoifoKkLA (Also, as for rhythm, it would probably sound even more weird for you if you knew the words, since many of her emphasises go on the japanese equivalents for "of", "too", "from", "?" and "!".

[animeweedlord]

Is the guy playing acoustic guitar on the street for tips not the sole creator of his work because some number of people were involved with manufacture of his guitar?

Most Vocaloid songs become popular in part because of videos that were animated by a single (usually different) person.

As for their voices lacking emotion, that's just, like, your opinion, man.