So, this synth has appeared
symphoneme.net
Symphoneme（シンフォーニーム）公式サイト
Symphoneme（シンフォーニーム）公式サイトです。MusicXMLをアップロードすれば無料でAIが歌声合成をしてくれます。また、歌声合成のみに限らず、マルチメディアな展開も予定しています。
symphoneme.net
Other SymphOneme Discussion thread
- Thread starter aru ii
- Start date
The characters and logo look like a JRPG
Still looking forward to hearing a demo, I'm intrigued
Edit: Judging by the description, it sounds like it will function like Neutrino. What do they mean by "cloud-based" though?
Still looking forward to hearing a demo, I'm intrigued
Edit: Judging by the description, it sounds like it will function like Neutrino. What do they mean by "cloud-based" though?
Last edited:
I’m assuming “cloud-based” means it’ll require an internet connection to use, kinda like ACE.
The secondary creation terms are kinda weird and specific. You can only make three of a charm/figure/whatever before you have to apply for a character license, even if you aren't mass producing it? You also can't make anything period even if you aren't mass producing it and only making a limited quality unless it's handmade (so no outsourcing to acrylic charm or doujin printing companies, I guess) - if it's made from scratch, you're only allowed to make three.
You can make 3D models of the characters and use them in videos and pictures, but under no circumstances are you allowed to distribute it regardless if it's free or paid.
I think that's really going to hinder any sort of growth these characters could have.
(Semirelatedly "excessive sexual expression" is written as being prohibited use of the characters, which is a little refreshing after seeing how some other companies handle that kind of content (not saying this to be a prude, but considering the rather big problem certain companies have with this, it's nice if a company actually cracks down on it for once). It doesn't define what's "excessive" though, which is a bit of a problem.)
You can make 3D models of the characters and use them in videos and pictures, but under no circumstances are you allowed to distribute it regardless if it's free or paid.
I think that's really going to hinder any sort of growth these characters could have.
(Semirelatedly "excessive sexual expression" is written as being prohibited use of the characters, which is a little refreshing after seeing how some other companies handle that kind of content (not saying this to be a prude, but considering the rather big problem certain companies have with this, it's nice if a company actually cracks down on it for once). It doesn't define what's "excessive" though, which is a bit of a problem.)
New Vocal Synth Dropped!!
I am strangely intrigued by this, even though the strict usage rules goes against what I usually love so much about synths. I guess because it's just so different from every other engine out there. I'll definitely be keeping my eye on this.
I am strangely intrigued by this, even though the strict usage rules goes against what I usually love so much about synths. I guess because it's just so different from every other engine out there. I'll definitely be keeping my eye on this.
I don't think it's that they don't want it to get popular, more that they're taking a completely different marketing strategy than what synth fandom is used to. They don't not want popularity and usage, they just don't the popularity and usage usually associated with Vocaloid and similar products. We're used to a near-total creative free-for-all (with the few odd restrictions here and there, see: Fukase...), but these guys seem to want a lot more control over how their characters are used and seen.
Thank God for that honestly, although it is kinda funny to hear when you look at some of these character designs. Rasetu's pants are so low you can practically see his pelvic bone, and Enemoprem (hell of a name, that) is about two seconds and one gust of wind away from flashing everyone with that flimsy shower curtain trying to pass itself off as a dress.
My impression/theory is that they're creating a new IP, and are combining it with a vocal synth in the hopes that the songs producers create will act as a means of promotion for them. In the past we had private Vocaloids and public Vocaloids, private ones being used solely by a company to promote another product. To me this looks like a halfway house between those two concepts: essentially a product tie-in that's also available to users in a limited capacity. The amount of lore they've established is leading into a broader story: perhaps a game or manga? The character designs feel much more 'visual novel' than software mascot.
Gen-chan (formerly Yuu) has accused a lot of people of stealing/using their code so I wouldn't get too worked up about that.
I would like to bring it to everyone's attention that the official artist makes and participates in SA R18+ content...
Disappointed, but not surprised. In fact, I'd only be surprised if they weren't like that.
The production, consumption, and normalization of morally objectionable (to put it extremely mildly) explicit content, particularly focusing on very young women and girls, is the ugly rotten kernel that all moe otaku media and "culture" grows out of. Idol singers (yes, including Miku and characters inspired by her), gacha games, V-tubers, visual novels, the whole industry of artists who pump out drawing after drawing of fetishized depictions of female characters that are so far removed from what real humans look and act like it's like comparing grey wolves to pugs... You can trace pretty much all of it back to the sexual objectification and commodification of young women and girls. There are of course exceptions, but not only are they/we in the minority if you count all of the people making and consuming "moe" content, a lot of otherwise innocent/"wholesome" stuff will still include at least some visual/storytelling elements that originated from (ugh) "loli" art. It's systemic and virtually unavoidable if you're any kind of fan of geeky stuff online, since it often seeps into otherwise unrelated media.
It sucks!
It sucks!
True...I've just never seen an vocasynth artist explicitly state that they like date SA scenarios.....gross
Ah, well this is fucking great. ATDan ruined Haiyi and the rest of Quadimension's catalogue for me; it's good at least that I didn't get too attached to this synth before finding out about this. Now I'm just waiting for news that Kei and iXima have made morally objectionable content so I can call it quits on vocalsynthesis for good.
It's a sad and very prevelant issue in the vocal synth space, seeping through from the industries they're connected to; due to its traumatic nature please continue to keep indepth discussion under spoilers, with content warnings where needed. Although important to draw attention to, this is for the consideration of our members. 
Maybe unpopular opinion, but... I don't think we need to boycott the synth because of unrelated art that the artist has done. Yeah it's morally questionable and I'm not a fan, but... [maybe uncomfortable themes]
Again, anyone can disagree, especially based on their own life experiences. We all have different ones, and different reactions to things. But that's my take on it.
It's been a longtime trend for people to make vent art, deal with personal traumas, or explore taboo topics by engaging with fictional versions of it. Non-con, guro, etc fiction or art is definitely not my cup of tea, but I don't believe it makes someone inherently definitely a bad person and that their actually innocent things can/should not be interacted with. It's healthier to confront these things in fiction anyway, and in my opinion it's fine as long as it's not being directly related to the synth itself. Like how fuckin weird and uncomfortable it is that the Medium5 girls get horny art drawn of them, that's weird and is connected to the synth by using the characters. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that doesn't seem to be the case here? I get why it can make people uncomfortable, but I simply can't agree. If people are really going to boycott this synth over other art the artist has drawn, it will only remind me of the waves of well intentioned but misguided people who insist that fiction needs to all be "wholesome". It would be different if the artist were actively drawing like... Nazi propaganda, as opposed to "dark" kinky shit. I'd boycott in an instant then.
Again, anyone can disagree, especially based on their own life experiences. We all have different ones, and different reactions to things. But that's my take on it.
Laaarge wall of text coming that I collapsed in spoilers to make a bit less overwhelming
...
With regard to SymphOneme itself, I must say, I'm not... overly excited? The character designs have some interesting elements. I'm intrigued by the villainous looking guy on the homepage that has his design obscured on the character page. The green kid's shorts with big shirt combination is cute, but otherwise leaves something to be desired. The girl in front looks like she might be an interesting female protagonist. The mask motif is interesting.
But nothing in particular is leaving me overtly intrigued or interested. I agree that the terms make this seem like a launching point for a new media project of some sort rather than an opportunity to create new crowd sourced characters akin to anime styled vocal synths of old, but the complete lack of connection to anything outside the vocal synth space has me wondering.
Speaking generally as a fan of vocal synths, as of late I've personally been satisfied by new character designs and the recent trend towards returning to android-like and 'futurism' inspired costume design, and on the flip side, straight-up meme characters co-opted by the community and injected with charm. Zundamon on the JP end and Kevin on the ENG end have been a great joy.
But I haven't been desiring or excited about the creation of brand-new engines, the recent exceptions being NEUTRINO, which was and continues to be unique at this time, OpenUTAU, and VOICEVOX. The reason for this being that they are all either doing something innovative and different with their respective technologies or taking an existing concept and making it open source. These projects are setting sights high for expandability, in the case of OpenUTAU, interoperability, and community modification.
Engine-wise, any excitement I have is generally immediately quashed by cloud dependency and subscription service models. I like that ACE is innovating in its own way and especially providing a great boon to innovation in the Chinese market (mostly because I do think it is a real competitor to Dreamtonics there-- and I wonder if this fact is why Dreamtonics has seem to have all but stopped interacting with the otaku-focused side of the community and its developers, because it percieves ACE as the fan favorite in that realm with Tianyi having a library there, but that's just conspiracy), but its cloud-focused setup, again, puts me off. I think the only users that are going to be able to truly use ACE are Chinese users, as it stands right now. And the cloud thing, again, presents a problem.
Cloud computing does provide a good avenue for commercial "pure" neural net AI voice synthesis because it is so computing resource-intensive-- and it makes sense, that because this product appears to be trying to do something identical to NEUTRINO with MusicXML files and presumably neural net vocal generation, that to make the product as accessible as possible and to make money, that they would take the computing load away from the user and charge a fee in the future as their business model. You can see that they don't seem to know yet how much their server costs will be-- there's an "xx" where the number of songs you are allowed to generate is, meaning they probably haven't stood anything up yet. I still don't like it, but I get it a little more in this case.
The person in charge seems to be @dctv_sumiya. He's been in the community for a very long time, but I don't know much about him beyond that. The account is following Akasakov, who's a somewhat prolific figure and is in charge of TOKYO6 right now, but he says he's not affiliated with the project and is just supporting it because his friend (presumably Sumiya) is working on it. And that's all I can glean from all of this.
I've also wanted more diversity in character and voice from modern voice synthesis, which SymphOneme might be targeting, but I wish that were happening in a better form.
Overall, I feel like it'll be surprising if this manages to make a splash. The name is admittedly clever, though. Symphony... phoneme... symphoneme... okay.
I don't think you have to worry about KEI and iXima.
Tortoiseshel is right that Miku was designed largely in part to target, and in response to, mid 2000's internet otaku sensibility, (in tandem with a lot of other design points-- robot theming, Yamaha instrument motif, etc) but Crypton have upheld a high standard for their characters and 'official' artists-- they are a very visible corporation and have ties with large parts of the music industry, and companies in the industry, that have nothing to do with the historical downfalls of anime girl character design and marketing. And, from what I've seen-- the people speaking publicly at Crypton and its affiliates are cognizant that there are entire generations of fans, including a great many children, that had Crypton's character designs and the music created with them as their first exposure and integration with this kind of media- rather than already being integrated in otaku culture and bringing their existing perceptions of the medium with them.
That doesn't separate or absolve Miku from this 'ecosystem' for lack of a better word, and Miku is very much still an otaku product (who among us does not consume otaku media, ultimately), but I think you can at least be somewhat at ease keeping the above in mind. I don't mean to oversell Crypton's ethics-- they are still a corporation, after all, and the scene was very different when Miku was released than as it is now, but this is what I have observed.
Tortoiseshel is right that Miku was designed largely in part to target, and in response to, mid 2000's internet otaku sensibility, (in tandem with a lot of other design points-- robot theming, Yamaha instrument motif, etc) but Crypton have upheld a high standard for their characters and 'official' artists-- they are a very visible corporation and have ties with large parts of the music industry, and companies in the industry, that have nothing to do with the historical downfalls of anime girl character design and marketing. And, from what I've seen-- the people speaking publicly at Crypton and its affiliates are cognizant that there are entire generations of fans, including a great many children, that had Crypton's character designs and the music created with them as their first exposure and integration with this kind of media- rather than already being integrated in otaku culture and bringing their existing perceptions of the medium with them.
That doesn't separate or absolve Miku from this 'ecosystem' for lack of a better word, and Miku is very much still an otaku product (who among us does not consume otaku media, ultimately), but I think you can at least be somewhat at ease keeping the above in mind. I don't mean to oversell Crypton's ethics-- they are still a corporation, after all, and the scene was very different when Miku was released than as it is now, but this is what I have observed.
...
With regard to SymphOneme itself, I must say, I'm not... overly excited? The character designs have some interesting elements. I'm intrigued by the villainous looking guy on the homepage that has his design obscured on the character page. The green kid's shorts with big shirt combination is cute, but otherwise leaves something to be desired. The girl in front looks like she might be an interesting female protagonist. The mask motif is interesting.
But nothing in particular is leaving me overtly intrigued or interested. I agree that the terms make this seem like a launching point for a new media project of some sort rather than an opportunity to create new crowd sourced characters akin to anime styled vocal synths of old, but the complete lack of connection to anything outside the vocal synth space has me wondering.
Speaking generally as a fan of vocal synths, as of late I've personally been satisfied by new character designs and the recent trend towards returning to android-like and 'futurism' inspired costume design, and on the flip side, straight-up meme characters co-opted by the community and injected with charm. Zundamon on the JP end and Kevin on the ENG end have been a great joy.
But I haven't been desiring or excited about the creation of brand-new engines, the recent exceptions being NEUTRINO, which was and continues to be unique at this time, OpenUTAU, and VOICEVOX. The reason for this being that they are all either doing something innovative and different with their respective technologies or taking an existing concept and making it open source. These projects are setting sights high for expandability, in the case of OpenUTAU, interoperability, and community modification.
Engine-wise, any excitement I have is generally immediately quashed by cloud dependency and subscription service models. I like that ACE is innovating in its own way and especially providing a great boon to innovation in the Chinese market (mostly because I do think it is a real competitor to Dreamtonics there-- and I wonder if this fact is why Dreamtonics has seem to have all but stopped interacting with the otaku-focused side of the community and its developers, because it percieves ACE as the fan favorite in that realm with Tianyi having a library there, but that's just conspiracy), but its cloud-focused setup, again, puts me off. I think the only users that are going to be able to truly use ACE are Chinese users, as it stands right now. And the cloud thing, again, presents a problem.
Large commercial engine-wise, I'd be excited for any news at all on Piapro Studio and VOCALOID.
Cloud computing does provide a good avenue for commercial "pure" neural net AI voice synthesis because it is so computing resource-intensive-- and it makes sense, that because this product appears to be trying to do something identical to NEUTRINO with MusicXML files and presumably neural net vocal generation, that to make the product as accessible as possible and to make money, that they would take the computing load away from the user and charge a fee in the future as their business model. You can see that they don't seem to know yet how much their server costs will be-- there's an "xx" where the number of songs you are allowed to generate is, meaning they probably haven't stood anything up yet. I still don't like it, but I get it a little more in this case.
The person in charge seems to be @dctv_sumiya. He's been in the community for a very long time, but I don't know much about him beyond that. The account is following Akasakov, who's a somewhat prolific figure and is in charge of TOKYO6 right now, but he says he's not affiliated with the project and is just supporting it because his friend (presumably Sumiya) is working on it. And that's all I can glean from all of this.
I've also wanted more diversity in character and voice from modern voice synthesis, which SymphOneme might be targeting, but I wish that were happening in a better form.
Overall, I feel like it'll be surprising if this manages to make a splash. The name is admittedly clever, though. Symphony... phoneme... symphoneme... okay.
I'm not sure what SA R-18+ is (I have a few guesses, but no way in hell am I looking that up), but as long as the artist isn't drawing these synth characters in that way or something, I'll survive via separating art from artist in this case.
Now, putting aside the elephant in the room, I actually think the designs are quite nice. They do give off very visual novel kind of vibes (or maybe even RPG) and I dig it. They grab my attention in a way where it's like "whoa, who are these characters?? I want to learn more about them!"
Meru Resonance has a very cool design and she looks totally badass. Resetsu has a very interesting design as well and looks very other-worldly--he also gets bonus points for being purple, my favorite color.
Enemopuremu gives off goddess vibes to me--she feels like she'd be some benevolent being who you meet in an RPG. (Don't know why, but she reminds me of some character the Zelda Oracle games. Dunno which one, though. It's been ages since I touched a Zelda game.)
The presumably always online requirement is a complete turn off to me as I like to be able to use my synths freely and sometimes my wi-fi sucks so not being able to use my synths because of garbage wi-fi or no wi-fi is an immediate "no" from me.
Regardless of my issue with the synth, I still wish them the best!
Quick mod note: Since it's come up, I'd like to ask everyone to please tread with caution regarding sensitive subjects. While these things are important to discuss and be aware of at large, the sensitivity of these topics should be handled with care and can be very triggering or upsetting to various forum members. I'd like to ask everyone to please keep things civil (not that they haven't been so far, just a reminder!) and if anyone expresses any discomfort or unease regarding these topics to please stop discussion of it in this thread. Overall, this is still about the Symphoneme synth, not a critique or discussion on otaku culture at large. (Interested parties are more than welcome to discuss in DMs or make an off topic thread about it!)
Personally, I'm... not at all interested, especially with that revelation about the artist. I think it's not exactly a great look for the creator(s?) to associate themselves with someone so open about their interests like that orz. That's pretty much where my opinion ends. I'm curious to hear how they'll sound so I'll probably listen to their demos when they drop, but I don't see myself using or actively supporting this synth in the future.
Personally, I'm... not at all interested, especially with that revelation about the artist. I think it's not exactly a great look for the creator(s?) to associate themselves with someone so open about their interests like that orz. That's pretty much where my opinion ends. I'm curious to hear how they'll sound so I'll probably listen to their demos when they drop, but I don't see myself using or actively supporting this synth in the future.
After spending an evening angsting over it, I'm kinda with Rylitah on this one. Considering I had to dig to find the artist, it seems like they're not going out of their way to promote them, but it's still icky. I won't even begin to defend anything the artist has done, because fiction or not, romanticizing and normalizing disgusting acts Is Not Okay. That said, I do really like the designs and costumes and such! I think the characters themselves look nice, and I'm willing to separate that from the grossness of the artist and I personally would like Enemorpem to use me as a footstool.
From a user perspective though, I don't have too much interest in it, since it seems it'll run similarly to Neutrino, which just isn't fun at all to me. I wish them all the best and look forward to hearing it though, and should they ever get a new primary artist, I'll support the hell outta them!
From a user perspective though, I don't have too much interest in it, since it seems it'll run similarly to Neutrino, which just isn't fun at all to me. I wish them all the best and look forward to hearing it though, and should they ever get a new primary artist, I'll support the hell outta them!
It runs more like AmadeuSY than Neutrino; as Neutrino can actually be used locally on your computer (and with the tuning assistant, much like any other program). Neutrino only recently implemented their online rendering, which is so that you can use their GPU since AI synthesis is very resource intensive for the most part.
I feel like this project is pretty lame orz...even if the artist wasn't suspect, I just don't see the appeal overall. I like the concept, but the execution leaves much to be desired. The designs have potential, but they're not making me go "wow, I want to play that game or engage with that media". In my opinion, at least.
I feel like this project is pretty lame orz...even if the artist wasn't suspect, I just don't see the appeal overall. I like the concept, but the execution leaves much to be desired. The designs have potential, but they're not making me go "wow, I want to play that game or engage with that media". In my opinion, at least.