• We're currently having issues with our e-mail system. Anything requiring e-mail validation (2FA, forgotten passwords, etc.) requires to be changed manually at the moment. Please reach out via the Contact Us form if you require any assistance.

Thoughts on Vocal Synth Music Preservation

Vector

Passionate Fan
Mar 6, 2022
115
First, some background: what is music preservation? People and organizations for some time have worked to ensure that cultural works and folk arts are preserved for future enjoyment and study. The zeitgeist changes, recordings disappear, and things are lost. It takes an active approach to keep things from disappearing into the aether. A century ago, ethnomusicologists like John and Alan Lomax travelled around with mobile recording studios, back in the early days of vinyl records, and took recordings of traditional music that was otherwise locked away in regional pockets. Their recordings were placed in archives, and in some cases spread to record labels, which also gave musicians such as the influential blues musician Leadbelly more of a platform. Thanks to their work, many decades later, we can go back and listen to recordings of long dead musicians performing musical genres that might not even be active anymore.

To this day, the National Archive of the United States engages in preservation efforts for traditional music, creating recordings of live performances and storing them. (They also store copies of releases from major record labels.) This is something I got to participate in myself once, as a volunteer at a music festival. I got to operate a hard drive based audio recorder hooked up to the mixing board, punching a marker button for each song and taking notes of the timestamps and any names the artist mentioned.

I feel like this concept is increasingly relevant to the vocal synth music community. We have a vibrant mixed media subculture that now spans at least 15 years (15 years Anno Miku, longer since the first release of Vocaloid) and reaches across many national borders. As time goes on, we're slowly picking up more and more instances of lost media due to unreliability of video hosts, artist deaths, deliberate deletions and whatnot. Some of that is remediated by fans reuploading things, but that only goes so far. Efforts like Archive.org don't really touch sites like YouTube and NicoNico, because the resources to mirror that much video data would be incredible. (It would be a sad day indeed if Luka Luka Night Fever became difficult to find and watch.)

It recently came to my attention that, for whatever reason, Doriko is closing their Nico Nico Douga and YouTube channels, and taking the videos private.

Google Translate:
(Important notice) The current doriko OFFICIAL WEBSITE and doriko Official YouTube Channel will be closed at 23:59 on October 31, 2022. Also, at the same time, most of the videos uploaded to Nico Nico Douga after December 2011 will be private.
I've already seen some people on Twitter talking about downloading everything and stashing it on Google Drive or whatever, but it really reminded me that there should be more of a concerted effort to archive as much of this (or internet-specific culture in general) as possible, whether it's individual data hoarders downloading their favorite videos instead of trusting them to remain online, gaining the attention of an established musical preservation organization, or some enterprising individual starting one.

Every song or book or movie is a part of history, and it's always a shame to lose things.
 
Last edited:

Blue Of Mind

The world that I do not know...
Apr 8, 2018
699
VocaDB already attempts to keep track of artist discographies, but it's not a host for content - if a song disappears, any links will simply go dead.

I'd say preservation might be trickier for the vocal synth fandom because some producers might not want their stuff to be actively shared again if they take it down, and may even issue DMCA claims to stop other people doing so. I've made my own preservation attempts on YouTube in the past, so I've run into these issues before, including copyright issues.
 

mobius017

Aspiring ∞ Creator
Apr 8, 2018
1,982
I think the idea of preserving vocal synth content is a good thought. The first issue that comes to mind is the one that Blue mentioned of an artist potentially not wanting their content to be public anymore.

It'd be neat if somehow something like the Library of Congress got interested in preserving such works for historical purposes. Though, in a way, I'd almost prefer that folks in the community manged it themselves--to have a really meaningful archive, you need to have folks who are involved in/familiar with the community and artists managing it. Those are the people who will immediately understand what the difference is between the different versions of vocal synth software, for example, or what the different engines are, or how an artist might go by several names.

I wonder if there would be any calling for some kind of extension to something like VocaDB--adding a feature to the site where artists could upload their content for preservation purposes. The content wouldn't be viewable, perhaps, or at least that wouldn't be the feature's primary function/it wouldn't be built to stream content at the scale of YouTube/Nico Nico, but it would be possible to upload your own content to a place for safekeeping, and it could be retrieved in some fashion if the need arose. Not sure exactly what form that would take--I'm basically trying to suggest archiving/making content available for historical preservation without rebuilding the content delivery infrastructure of YouTube/Nico Nico. Artists could also remove their own content if they really wanted to; though, since it's supposed to be an archive, we'd have to hope that they wouldn't want to. Maybe the fact that the site wasn't built to have the easy accessibility of YouTube/Nico Nico would encourage them to leave their content in the archive alone, even if they removed it in other places.

A rub with the new platform is obviously where the money to run it would come from. The common wisdom is that digital storage is cheap and getting cheaper. But it would need to be a safe place, likely in the cloud, where the content could be uploaded in a distributed fashion--i.e., the uploaded files are stored in several places so that if one location has an issue, the content isn't gone. Facilities for doing things like that do exist, but they obviously aren't free, which brings us back to funding.

It occurs to me that the "extend VocaDB" option could be a paid add-on feature for artists who want to preserve their content. I.e., I want to have the preservation feature added to my VocaDB account, so I opt into a paid account and am allowed to upload the new tracks I produce to the archive. The issue there is if something happens to me, no one pays anymore, and presumably my content has to go away--which defeats the purpose of an archive. It also puts sort of a pay-to-play spin on the idea that I'm not quite comfortable with--it would cause the content of artists who can pay to be preserved, while content of artists who can't pay would tend to get lost.

As an alternative, the thing could be funded as a charitable endeavor, with folks in the community who feel strongly about it contributing some amount each month/year/etc. It might be really cool if some of the vocal synth companies felt like helping out as financial contributors--having their names associated with a project like that would generate goodwill, no? But I think management of the content/site should remain in the hands of a neutral staff of librarians, to ensure that preservation is handled fairly.

I mentioned VocaDB a lot. I'm not really saying that the thing would need to be built based on VocaDB or that it's their job or anything. VocaDB, with its excellent and curated data on songs/artists/etc., just seems like a very good jumping-off point for this kind of extension. It could easily be a new site built just for the purpose of being the archive, but then everything about data/searching has to be redone. Although, IIRC, VocaDB has an API, so the new site could potentially use VocaDB's data without having to be part of VocaDB itself.

As I was writing, I was thinking a lot about song content, but I'd love to see the archive include other kinds of content, too--artwork, written work, songs, videos, everything. Some of those things are already covered by things like the Wayback Machine/other internet archives, but it'd be great to have everything all in one place. It might be possible to use archived stuff from those internet archives, similar to using the content from VocaDB via API, or maybe not. Of course, it's an archive, so you really don't want to pull stuff from the Wayback Machine via linking anyway.
 
Last edited:

Vector

Passionate Fan
Mar 6, 2022
115
I wonder if there would be any calling for some kind of extension to something like VocaDB--adding a feature to the site where artists could upload their content for preservation purposes. The content wouldn't be viewable, perhaps, or at least that wouldn't be the feature's primary function/it wouldn't be built to stream content at the scale of YouTube/Nico Nico, but it would be possible to upload your own content to a place for safekeeping, and it could be retrieved in some fashion if the need arose. Not sure exactly what form that would take--I'm basically trying to suggest archiving/making content available for historical preservation without rebuilding the content delivery infrastructure of YouTube/Nico Nico.
That's kind of what I was thinking along the lines of. Copyright law (my thoughts on it needed to be heavily reformed notwithstanding) is an encumbrance for all kinds of library and archival work, as Blue of Mind pointed out...though there are actually some fairly limited exemptions for preservation issues, in the US at least.

There are kind of three principle points when it comes to the idea of "preservation:"

1. Cataloguing efforts, which is an area VocaDB and the Vocaloid Wiki serve fairly well. Between the two of them we have adequate documentation of discographies, concert appearances, lyrics (including translations) and bits of history.

2. Continuity of streaming access. This is pretty much off the table as far as legitimate efforts, for legal reasons, unless artists opt in to such things. Though fans tend to do "grey area" re-uploads of stuff anyway.

3. Library of Congress style long term/academic archival. This is potentially more feasible, since the primary function is stockpiling things rather than disseminating them.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Blue Of Mind

MagicalMiku

♡Miku♡
Apr 13, 2018
1,275
Sapporo
saving all the data is basically impossible, but the best thing anybody can do is save their favorite music from as many sources as possible ^-^
my hard drives have TBs and TBs of Miku songs, and my sources are:
- first and most important, the official album CDs: physical media is so important not only for collection, but also for saving the music itself. for any CD I own, I have it saved in my hard-drives in both FLAC and AAC
- second, piapro: there are thousands of songs available on piapro, and some of these songs are really not available anywhere else
- mora service (available only in Japan): digital store of Sony for high quality songs in FLAC format and without DRM, has many Vocaloid albums (many from Karent)
- niconico and youtube: in this case, I prefer to save the video, and I save also the audio file if I don't have it from the previous sources

have a safe backup is important in this case: I have multiple hard drives, and also SSDs, flash pendrives (in sizes of 128 GB and 256 GB), blu-rays 25GB and XL 100GB. in the future I plan to purchase also the tape recorder ^-^

hope it helped(‾◡◝) :miku_ani_lili::luka_lili::rin_smile_lIlI::len_smile_lili::meiko_ani_lili::kaito_ani_lili:
 

Users Who Are Viewing This Thread (Users: 0, Guests: 1)