[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 "!".