For me personally that's on the iffy side. I think what we should be doing is encouraging ( now let's say for japanese accent but applies for any non-native accent ) japanese people, well versed in english, to be recording eng jp accented voicebanks instead of forcing those not comfortable with it to record them and letting native and fluent english speakers on their develpoment teams when developing english voicebanks to ensure good quality but I am not sure whether erasure is the right approach.
I think the answer here isn't the ability to distort accents, it's making more VBs with varied accents and singing styles. That's a bridge that will need to be crossed if they get there, but like... to me, the thought of distorting a VB's accent or style is kinda like trying to make Sachiko sing Idol Pop because you don't like an Enka-style voice. It just doesn't feel right.
Yes I definitely see your point and the positives you brought up are 100% true and valid, I just feel like there two sides to one coin and while you yourself aren't malicious there are users like that and it could backfire and it's worth wondering whether it's worth it when we could be giving opportunities to people of those accents/dialects instead.
It should be taken into account that Macne Nana's voice provider is fluent in English while Miku's is not; Miku's V4 English is better than her V3 English because they didn't try masking her accent as intensely, which resulted in better more natural sounding product. And from what I've heard, the issue with her CHN wasn't necessarily the accent as much as general muffled-ness and fuzzy engine noise. She had accent issues, yes, because again Saki Fujita doesn’t speak the language she was recording, but that was hardly the predominating issue. The point would be to hire voice providers comfortable with the lamguage instead of forcing those unfamiliar with it, I think.As far as a non-native speaker voicing a bank goes, the way I see it is that an accent can be cute and fine, but only to an extent. For example, I find Nana's English accent pretty cute because overall (with a good deal of phoneme editing) she can be understandable. However, Miku English is a lot harder to make understandable, so people had a lot of complaints about her V3, and the V4 is better. Native Chinese speakers also complained about Miku Chinese until Crypton released a patch to help it. If it's a product -- an instrument -- that someone is paying $100 (give or take) for, I think not being able to understand it is a valid complaint.
In any case I don't really think accent erasure is going to happen so much as, they're attempting to alleviate the issue of Latin American vs. Spanish accents because it can do both so the user can choose, or how in V1 the vowels tended to be very "British" and if I'm using Leon and I say "oh gross that vowel sounds off if I tune the rest of his phonemes to sound how I'd sing it ie. vaguely American", I can go into the Resonance parameters and change the vowel sound how I like. It's a matter of convenience and pleasing the largest audience possible, and if they can pull it off then I think it's a smart move. Certainly, there can be unforeseen consequences, but I don't think it will end up being a huge deal
But, we shall see!
Totally agreed about the VP, but I think that's where some companies are smart in attempting to match voices while changing voice providers for different languages! There's obv pros and cons of that method, but if you're a company hoping to get a product to sell then it needs to be decent quality, so the tradeoff may be worth it to you... As a listener I'd rather the tone maybe be slightly different because of a different VA than for it to technically be understandable but sound really "stiff" because the VA wasn't comfortable in that language, type thing. But that's personal preference that I understand plenty would disagree with! There's no clear answer here, of course. Situational and all. It's just something to think about :)
