Hello everyone!
I hope everyone's in good health and otherwise keeping well. Some of you may remember me from a few months ago, but just to say again: I'm Jess, a research student in music looking into singing synthesis and how it's reconstructing our ideas about voice and what we can do with it.
I'm writing an article on Hatsune Miku's opera 'The End' at the moment, and I was thinking about this idea that Vocaloids (or any virtual singer tbh) is somehow perfect or limitless in performance, and human performers are much more prone to error. I'm coming round to the idea that this isn't true: technology can break down; code can screw up; things can malfunction unexpectedly. Of course, it's true that Vocaloid doesn't really have the capacity to be performed live/in-real time, and so that's obviously a major difference - there's more of a similarity to film which is edited to "perfection". I know there's a video of Miku "breaking down" at one MikuEXPO performance but I don't know when/where it happened so can't locate the video.
So..this brings me on to my two questions:
1) Have you witnessed (or even better, have a video of) a Vocaloid "breaking down" in live performance? What happened and how were things resolved?
2) If you're a singing synth user, have you ever had problems with the software which meant that the voice did weird things you didn't expect it to? (again recordings would be amazing if you have them).
Please get in touch if you can help me with these questions, and if you're happy to be interviewed over message/email and be part of this research.
Thanks everyone! Also, sorry if this isn't the right place to be posting...am happy to be redirected if so!
Jess
I hope everyone's in good health and otherwise keeping well. Some of you may remember me from a few months ago, but just to say again: I'm Jess, a research student in music looking into singing synthesis and how it's reconstructing our ideas about voice and what we can do with it.
I'm writing an article on Hatsune Miku's opera 'The End' at the moment, and I was thinking about this idea that Vocaloids (or any virtual singer tbh) is somehow perfect or limitless in performance, and human performers are much more prone to error. I'm coming round to the idea that this isn't true: technology can break down; code can screw up; things can malfunction unexpectedly. Of course, it's true that Vocaloid doesn't really have the capacity to be performed live/in-real time, and so that's obviously a major difference - there's more of a similarity to film which is edited to "perfection". I know there's a video of Miku "breaking down" at one MikuEXPO performance but I don't know when/where it happened so can't locate the video.
So..this brings me on to my two questions:
1) Have you witnessed (or even better, have a video of) a Vocaloid "breaking down" in live performance? What happened and how were things resolved?
2) If you're a singing synth user, have you ever had problems with the software which meant that the voice did weird things you didn't expect it to? (again recordings would be amazing if you have them).
Please get in touch if you can help me with these questions, and if you're happy to be interviewed over message/email and be part of this research.
Thanks everyone! Also, sorry if this isn't the right place to be posting...am happy to be redirected if so!
Jess