No.13942
>>13750It might be a little different from saying something is “missing,” but I do feel like the whole voice-synth ecosystem—tech, creators, and fans—has matured and settled into place to some extent.
Back then, everyone was genuinely feeling their way forward, and because nobody could see what was coming, it felt like every possibility was wide open. There’s still plenty to enjoy and be surprised by today, of course—but it doesn’t feel like the same kind of uncharted territory. With all the precedents and hard-earned lessons that came before, the community has built up a lot of shared knowledge.
That stability helped the scene grow, but I do feel a bit nostalgic for that old uncertainty.
Still, I think even if all the “pieces” are already here, there are countless combinations nobody has tried yet. I’d love to experience that kind of pure surprise again.
No.13949
>>13942I still think the surprise factor is still there. Today we are used to listening to whatever's popular but every once in a while some producer will make an unexpected hit with an unexpected Vocaloid, like a couple years back Yukopi made a song with Kaai Yuki and it was everywhere.
No.14050
>>13949Yeah, that kind of surprise definitely still happens—and you’re right, it can kick off a whole new wave.
What I meant by “surprise,” though, is something a bit more on the technical side.
Back in the Nico Nico days, a mysterious video showed up with “ぼかりす” in the title. It was Hatsune Miku, but at the time it sounded incredibly close to a human singing voice.
Nico Nico:
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm3128145YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msEN5bbIgbcIt was uploaded on April 28, 2008—only about eight months after Miku’s release—and it really made an impact. And at first, nobody even knew what it was.
A few days later, it turned out to be “VocaListener,” developed by AIST in Japan—basically a system that estimates singing parameters from a human performance to help a Vocaloid sing more naturally. Not fully automatic, but it showed the potential very clearly.
These days, as AI has advanced, “human-like” singing isn’t shocking anymore. Still, I’d love to experience that kind of moment again—when something new suddenly expands what’s possible in the creative world.
No.14054
>>14050Was unaware of this. Interesting.
No.14056
>>14050I actually had heard of VocaListener before. This was before the whole AI boom so people used that to make their tuning sound more realistic. It's cool that it was around for that long and that it was announced this way.
No.14058
>>14050I feel the same way about a plugin that came out for SynthV that makes voicebanks scream
No.14069
>>14050I've seen people automatically tune a voicebank in SynthV then transfer the tuning to other engines like Vocaloid and UTAU. Admittedly it's not as impressive as manual tuning or the Vocalistener you posted but it's still interesting that it can be done at all.
No.14359
>>14050I think i remember using this when i was a kid
No.15334
I don't think a lot of people will realize this until it's over but we are in a new golden era of vocaloid. In the mid 2010s there was a shared sentiment among producers that vocaloid was dead/dying.
No.15345
>>15334This is connected to what I had mentioned earlier about V3 being an initial failure and how nostalgia blinds us a little bit in regards to past information.
It’s kind of funny, we’ve had 2 maybe even 3 times where “vocaloid is dying” or “vocaloid is dead” was a common sentiment but both times I can think of, one time was proven to have had a huge decline while the other was the complete opposite because everyone was at home making new songs during the pandemic lol
It’s just so funny looking and comparing the stats because things for Vocaloid as a whole are much better now than they used to be. Even I used to be nostalgia blind like this.
Hard not to chuckle at my own naivety.
No.15346
>>15334For me, as much as I hate the new crowd, I'd rather vocaloid still get used rather than die in obscurity. I will still forever prefer to live in 2012-2014 though. I will acknowledge that we are in a second golden era though.
No.15347
I've seen some refer to this second gold era as a Renaissance, which makes sense in the grand scheme.
No.15355
>>15351>>15352specifically episode 9 and its terrible cgi
around 2012-2014 there was a huge bubble of song series turning into light novels, manga and anime. people thought this was going to be the future of vocaloid, like it was going to be narou-kei before narou-kei was a thing... then most of them turned out to have questionable quality. this ep was so indefensible that it kinda became a turning point where vocaloid was officially cringe.
No.15360
>>15358>danganronpaWhat do they even have in common aside from similar fanbase
No.15364
>>15360edgy chuunibyou writing, large colorful cast of characters, tons of main character death, timeline shenatomodachins, gay shipping encouraged
it wouldn't literally be danganronpa but tl;dr similar audience by design
No.15374
>>15346>>15347I would consider it a renaissance.
Curiously though, interest appears to have peaked in the 2010s according to Google Trends.
No.15376
>>15374Dunno how good of a metric it is, lots of people these days probably just searching "Kasane Teto" or "SynthV" etc. It's less centralized on Vocaloid
No.15379
>>15355>>15357>>15358all of the kagepro fans i knew in those days were so pretentious. never got into it because no one would tell me what was it about or because "can't explain the plot lmao it's too hard to understand". it's just nasuverse mystic eyes what's so difficult about it.
still preferring it one hundred times more than puroseka, shame the project died
No.15436
>>15379>"can't explain the plot lmao it's too hard to understand"well i mean, as a kagepro fan, they're not wrong
every adaption of it has a different sort of story/timeline/whatever, so it gets confusing
No.15439
>>15355I remember when I first watched the anime the CG was so bad that I didn’t remotely recognize that these were supposed to be the same characters. It made me wonder why they opted to use it. Was there not enough time to draw or was it just artsy? It was rough. Rewatching it later I got the BD and I thought I had experienced the Mandela effect or something until I saw this image.
Personally I don’t think even if the episode and this scene had been different when it first aired that it would have had significant impact on the Vocaloid scene or history at the time. I do think it’s really cool to see Vocaloid series adapted into other media, however it’s always either detracted from the original art or simply wasn’t written in a way that felt natural like the song. There’s a good Vocaloid series adaptions that I have enjoyed and felt natural, but it proved to me at least that creating adaptations from music isn’t as easy as it seems by comparison.
No.15440
>>15374>>15376>>15377All these metrics are a mixed bag in terms of reliability. In some regard they help to give a really good idea of things but aren’t often a perfect representation of the overall picture. The Vocaloid search metric for example makes a lot of sense when you consider how people were first learning about and getting into Vocaloid as well as the early beginnings of the current day anime fandom. More people would stumble across Miku or Vocaloid and get curious and look it up, where today a lot of new fans are coming in from either dedicated games or game collabs and searching not through Google, but social media. It’s not a perfect explanation for other search terms but in that context makes sense.
What a lot of people in Japan at least refer to when it comes to “vocaloid dying” is the number of music releases and how much attention those songs gain based on the community at the time.
It’s also important to kinda note that a lot of those search metrics may likely be by repeat users. I used to, and still on occasion do, used to go to the same sites for Vocaloid all the time when I was young. Instead of remembering the url though, I’d just put “vocaloid” in the search bar.
No.15486
>>15440Could be lots of people are just using AI services these days instead of Google also. I think the amount of people that search it over and over again probably doesn't vary wildly from back in the day. But I agree for sure, the best metrics are amount of new releases and the attention they get.
Regardless though at the very least there ought to be some correlation with Vocaloid popularity and Google searches, so it's atleast an indicator. It's difficult to say whether Vocaloid is more popular today or back in the first boom based on this metric though.
No.15615
>>12960>>12960(apologies in advance for blogpost)
I became a Vocaloid fan in 2008; I was 10 years old.
From the western side, our world was a lot smaller looking back — or it might just be my recollection since I wasn't using NND. At the time, it felt like we were all watching the same producers and small translators/reposters. Everyone listened to the same music, for the most part.
So when I bought Project Diva & PD 2nd for my PSP off of PlayAsia, I remember being so stunned and wondering what the fuck was going on in the OG community! Hardly half of the songs were recognizable to me. I didn't realize how small my world was when Youtube was all we had.
I used to fear it, but imo, the big move and prevalent use of Youtube was a net positive for the community. It's a lot easier to find small producers, and I feel like I'm locking onto someone new every month. My head would roll if I told 13-year-old me where the fandom is now.
And I still have no clue what the fuck Mekakucity Actors is about
No.15616
>>15615VocaDB has also been extremely useful
No.18215
>>15379I'm gonna be honest i didn't even listen to the songs that inspired Kagepro. I knew Jin but never really bothered to even check his music out (except Children Record, i think i heard that one somewhere else). I also didn't watch Kagepro when Tumblr was obsessing over it either so i missed out on that part of the early vocaloid fandom entirely. I'd watch it for the hot blue tomboy chick tho.
No.23824
>>13016>Real decline would be when veterans start gatekeepingThey're already doing this. I don't know how the newcomers behave on the Japanese side of the fandom, but they're notoriously disrespectful on the English side. "Don't let the newgens find this"
(newgen is a slang term for new fans = "new generation") is a comment I see often on both old and new songs with sexual themes, or other taboo topics such as violence.
That being said though, I don't think any of the gatekeeping has been effective and with or without it, I don't see Vocaloid declining in popularity anytime soon.
No.23831
>>23824Ironically all the reliance on new age slang like newgen, Vocaboomer, or WVF is probably the clearest signal that someone has probably gotten into Vocaloid inside of this decade.
I would counter that even if Vocaloid is at an absolute height of popularity, Vocaloid being seen as immature is what caused many Japanese producers to flee to commercial music the fiest time when they had the chance. It's not exactly a character you want a fandom or subculture or fad to be colored with if you're interested in longevity or having people develop their skills around. Italian brainrot may be on top of the world right now, but so was Skibidi toilet.
No.23832
>>23831Not the guy you quoted but I wouldn't say those terms are 100% an indicator that someone's new. I use WVF and JVF to refer to the different sides of the fandom and have been a fan since 2011 (unless that era is still considered "new").
No.23833
>>23832half agree on "newgen" and "Vocaboomer" though
No.23835
>>23832That's really the least odious since it has a functional purpose to explain a real split, but it's also unnecessarily jargon-y. It's giving a collective label to a geography when you could probably say something more meaningful by narrowing it to western producers, western listeners, etc.
No.23836
>>23835I guess, but "Western Vocaloid Fandom" encapsulates both and WVF is just short for that, so it's convenient to use it when referring to both.
No.23839
>>23835I feel like the Western jargon is meant to put the relevant cultural split into words. It’s just vaguely correlated to geography. I can’t think of a better way to describe it.
No.23844
>>23839Personally I don't see what's wrong with "overseas fans" if you need to communicate the split. Subcultural identity being tied to geography isn't novel to Vocaloid, and even the Japanese will class their participation down to prefectures for club events or fan concerts, but the identity is so loose for "western" that I don't really see much utility in that category. Especially since I don't think it even really encompasses places like China properly. "WFH" as adopted label just stinks of stan culture to me, maybe.
No.23846
>>23845>>23844I call them western fans because that's what everyone calls them but 90% of the time its used to refer to English speaking fans.
No.23848
>>23844Modern vocaloid fandom does overlap a little with stan culture as much as i hate to admit that. Though i highly doubt the term originated from there because I've seen it decades ago.
No.23892
>>23844>>23846"Western Vocaloid fandom" should be used when generalizing about societies descended from Europe, or in contrast to the "Eastern Vocaloid fandom", which includes countries other than Japan. For Western internet communities, language can be more important than where you live, so if people are speaking English, "English speaking Vocaloid fandom" is more correct than "Western Vocaloid fandom". However, for Eastern online spaces, nationality often takes precedent, so "Japanese Vocaloid fandom" usually means people who not only speaks the language, but who is also ethnically and culturally Japanese. "Non-Japanese Vocaloid fandom" or "overseas Vocaloid fandom" can be used to refer to all Vocaloid fans who are not Japanese.