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mobius017
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  • Sometimes I wish my folks understood how I feel about my vocal synth hobby. To put it in the context of my recent fanfic, I wish they could see the "ocean," too. But there just aren't that many people who see it that way, especially not when they're stuck on flesh and blood performers and don't really understand the sorts of pains that many people who love vocal synths seem to share.
    This is a question I think I can more or less answer myself, but I'm sort of curious. Every once in awhile, I see people mentioning winding up meeting IRL, but since I think most people avoid sharing too much in the way of IRL details, I wonder how it happens? I mean, without that info, you could walk past 5 people you know online and never know it.

    The only ways I can think of it happening would be:
    1. They arrange to meet beforehand at a particular time/place, with some sort of way to recognize each other.
    2. They meet somewhere by chance (maybe in line for a concert?), get to talking, ask what sites each other is a member of, and wind up discovering that they know each other.
    IO+
    IO+
    I think most people avoid sharing too much in the way of IRL details
    They have a valid reason. I usually met with people that i know well.

    They arrange to meet beforehand at a particular time/place, with some sort of way to recognize each other
    You got it right. It's doesn't have to be a fancy place however. A normal location like park, coffee shop is fine. If you and your friend know each other well, doing thing together for a long time (like playing online games, voice chats, collab, etc) or just simply hang around in skype/discord together, you might recognize them real fast, even though you just meet them face-to-face for the first time. (in my experience at least)

    They meet somewhere by chance (maybe in line for a concert?), get to talking, ask what sites each other is a member of, and wind up discovering that they know each other.
    This is quite inconvenience for me. Being friendly and open is good but i rather keep it to myself.
    But, if we have a lot in common, i think it quite safe to have some conversation and exchange thing that you feel comfortable.
    pico
    pico
    At this point, most of the online friends I have are people I've known and talked to continuously for 6-7 years. In the longest cases, I've known some of these people for 11-12 years. That's over half my life. So for those online friendships, sharing the odd personal detail is not really that crazy for us. I think this may also be a 'cultural' difference between the zoomer and millennial generations.

    As far as online acquaintances or community members, it's still often a good opportunity to make new friends when there are events or get-togethers! I am pretty anxious so I don't love one-on-one meetups but I've met friends from online in groups in public spaces and it has been a great time! Planning to get food at a fun restaurant together is a good way to break the ice.

    I've met people I knew online by chance twice. They were such ridiculous coincidences I couldn't believe it.
    mobius017
    mobius017
    Thank you so much, everyone! The stories related sound like fun. That's really neat!

    @MagicalMiku: Yep, "IRL" stands for "in real life." Sorry for the confusion!
    Ugh, I ended up going to bed early and then splitting my longer sleep time with music work. I love what I accomplished, but I'm FEELIN' only having slept 2.5-3 hours at a time.
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    WyndReed
    WyndReed
    Would taking a nap help? They make me depressed sometimes, but they help some people.
    mobius017
    mobius017
    Probably--I'd love one! I've got work, though.

    Coffee is helping, though, along with a really deep breath or two sometimes. This'll just have to be one of those pleasurable pains associated with trying to grow creatively :) .
    I had a dumbly profound thought.

    When you're little and you start learning about geography, you learn about where you live first, and then branch out into the rest of the world. So you think of everywhere else as relative to where you are/home is.

    Now imagine you grew up somewhere else entirely. A different continent, even. Probably you'd be taught the same way. And again, you'd think of everywhere relative to where home is. Except this time, home is completely different.

    Now imagine that, instead, you decided to relocate, and you spent long enough there/accepted your new home enough that you started to think of everywhere else as relative to that place instead.

    It's easy to grasp conceptually, but really try to imagine what it would feel like to natively think of things from each of those perspectives.

    I guess people who travel around the globe routinely probably at least start to experience these sorts of things, but it's sort of a mindjob, isn't it, imagining the first image that comes to mind/your initial perception of the world changing? It's sort of disorienting, in a good way, the same way that a room looks completely different the first time you view it from standing on top of a table.
    Can you set the singing style for multiple regions at once in Vocaloid 5? If you select multiple regions, the Customize button gets deactivated.
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    IO+
    IO+
    Pin, i wanted to know too, if it impossible i hope they put it on v6 update roadmap.
    mobius017
    mobius017
    @IO+, @WyndReed: Hm, it seems like you can. If all the regions are in the same track, you can just select all, and the Customize button will remain active.

    If your regions are on different tracks, if you click the Customize button in one one region and set it as you like, you can then click and drag to select all the other regions, and the Customize pane will stay open. Settings you make at that point will be applied to all the selected regions. (I don't think it's really supposed to work like that--it seems like more of a hack. But it works. As a warning, doing that did make my performance meter in V5 go a bit nuts for maybe a minute or two.)

    In both cases, there's an exception when turning off effects--I had to do that for each region individually.
    Is Vault Kid still around? Been listening to a bunch of their music lately and figured I'd drop them a shout-out, but they don't seem to be here anymore.
    Vector
    Vector
    I didn't realize they were on here, until I happened to spot the name on the Discord group when I happened to check it recently. I first heard of them through their cool collaboration with Flanger Moose during the 2021 Miku Expo.
    mobius017
    mobius017
    Same here. Their music has a great 90s/Lofi/chiptune vibe. And their 4Blood remix is great!
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    Vector
    Vector
    I'll have to look into it more sometime. Especially since I'm a big fan of 4Blood.
    Why does it seem like every tom sample I have had so much frickin' reverb on it? It's like they weren't secure enough with them just being what they are (a drum), they had to slap some effect on them to make them "special."

    Ah, I shouldn't complain. I could probably get a basic tom from one of my stock instruments, I just wanted to get one out of XO to avoid loading another plug-in. And XO is really good for its breadth of different sounds, so it's not like it needs to focus on more vanilla ones you easily could get elsewhere. And I did find a kick that'll do.
    I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. Right after I laid down, I got an inspiration. Two hours later, I'd written most of a roughly 1-page fanfic.

    Which is to say: new mini vocal synth fanfic coming soon!
    Currently wearing moccasins (Native American shoes) and a Miku Expo t-shirt, driving coffee from my Miku mug, working on lofi (hip hop?) music featuring Australian samples and where a Japanese girl sings in English.

    The world's different aspects (not even really nationalities; all kinds of things) can get along this way, and I wish they would more often.
    Vector
    Vector
    Music is great for that, honestly. I'm really interested in Eurodance/Eurobeat and House, which only existed because of that sort of global fusion. You have Japanese drum machines and synths (TR-909, Akai samplers, and Roland, Yamaha and Korg synths were ubiquitous) on one hand. Those genres all directly descend from disco, which predominantly was an American Black/Latin/LGBT thing to start with...and clubs like the Warehouse were key in disco evolving into early House after mainstream backlash. Then things evolved a lot in European clubs (particularly Italy, with Italo Disco and Eurobeat, and France with House acts like Daft Punk) and went on to be a major influence on J-Pop starting in the late 90s.

    Any time you hear a drum machine playing a typical four-on-the-floor dance beat, you're hearing something that's a part of that lineage. It's cool to think about.
    Thoughts on Miku singing in English:

    Intelligibility is important to me, but there's also a point where you have to respect a vocal synth for being what it is. Miku English is a vocal synth of a Japanese woman singing in English, which isn't her first language. That's not something you complain about; it's part of the color and part of the character.

    I personally also find her struggles in this area thematically apropos. All of her users are struggling with something, whether it's with doing the music thing or something else. The fact that English takes a bit more work for her fits well into that idea--it's like there's something she struggles with, too. That shared struggle has been part of her character since "Miku Miku no Shiite Ageru."

    That said, I wouldn't be opposed to an AI Miku who could do English more smoothly, as long as it sounds like her. There was nothing wrong with the direction of V4, IMO, for example.

    (Continued below.)
    mobius017
    mobius017
    Side thought:

    I wonder.... If Miku AI became a thing, and we're worried about it sounding like her, why not train the AI partly on her classic songs? Ask the big classic Miku producers-- Deco*27, kz, Mitchie M, etc.--if they'd be willing to have their 2000s-era songs used to help train Miku's AI. CFM's probably the only company with the necessary relationships with its fanbase to try something like this. Some of the producers might decline, but maybe a bunch of them wouldn't mind--maybe in exchange for modest one-time compensation, or a grateful thanks on the box. The songs are over 10 years old anyway, and producers' primary output is songs, not tuning (though it might be a somewhat bigger deal for Mitchie, who's known as a tuning god). (Or open things up and ask for volunteers to have their songs used.) Throw those songs from all those different classic era producers together, along with the human training material that would've been used anyway, into a blender and see what the AI comes out with. Shouldn't it be less AI-sameness and more of what Miku's iconic sound has come to be?

    In that scenario, you have Miku and her fanbase teaching the next generation of Miku. What could be more appropriate than that?
    AmazingStrange39
    AmazingStrange39
    YES

    I feel like her strong accent and mispronunciations give her a certain element of character? Like she worked hard to learn English herself to speak to and sing for her international fans. And I've pretty much always been a fan of characters having their own speaking styles and accents, and when it comes to Vocaloids I think about this a lot too (I did a ton of research on Irish accents largely to piece together Avanna's speaking style even).

    In a Talkloid set earlier, like in her early V3 days, I might have Miku be more likely to make mistakes; not full on "you-no-take-candle" level broken English, but some very odd phrasing, malapropisms and incorrect use of grammar here and there. By V4 she's much less likely to make mistakes like that but still has features like relative lack of difference in stressed and unstressed syllables (resulting in a very "measured"-sounding prosody). I can see her having an almost exaggerated American intonation, almost as if she's reading a book aloud or something (reading a book aloud in an engaging way, not like the kid in school who reads it in the most flat and boring way possible).

    I think for Miku I might use lots of pitch bend to give her an almost "bouncing" intonation, but give her more measured, occasionally unsure or unsteady, stress, while Avanna's speech is flatter pitch-wise (nowhere near a monotone but much less pitch-bend-y) but has a more rhythmic, "lilting" stress pattern.

    Also, I tend to make Miku speak in a pretty high pitch which should be unsurprising (unless I'm using dark, solid, or V3 English where I pitch it down a few notches). Avanna, of course, speaks much lower (and making a Talkloid with Miku and switching it to Avanna produces some very jarring results; Avanna should not speak like a Japanese teen pop star, it's safe to say).
    You know a song we hardly ever hear in concerts? Iroha's "Moon." Awesome song, though it's a bit different, so getting the vibe to fit might be a bit of a challenge. Still, it'd be really cool to see that happen again!
    I'm feeling like a bacon breakfast sandwich, some coffee with too much sugar/etc. to be good for me, some sunshine, and a day off. Sound good to anyone else?
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