Cool Find of the Day: VOCA-ON!

Welcome to Cool Finds, a new category/segment/whatever where I will be bringing cool anime or manga related things I happen to find in my journeys around the interwebs.  Could be a website dedicated to a certain series/character, a video, a game, whatever.  Either way, I’m sure you’ll like it.  So enjoy!

Vocaloid is a pretty amazing piece of vocal synthesizer software developed by Yamaha of Japan.  By supplying it with lyrics and a melody, you can have it synthesize the singing of said lyrics, using your choice of a variety of voices, both male and female, based on samples taken from actual voice actors/actresses and singers.  The result sound surprisingly good.  Compare this to the good old US of A’s entry into this space, the hilariously bad Microsoft Songsmith.  (Don’t believe me about the hilariously bad part?  Then take a look at this.  Or this.  Or even this.)  (Yes, I know, Songsmith doesn’t do exactly what Vocaloid does.  With Songsmith, you sing the lyrics, and it’ll create a melody around them.  But the concept is similar enough that I think it applies here.  Besides, my blog, my rules.)  Anyway, the Vocaloid software is so popular that the Japanese have even created anime-ish representations of the various voices, as they are wont to do.  One of the most popular is Hatsune Miku, who is so popular that she has “released” not only quite a few albums featuring her singing, but is featured in several games as well.

Anyway, a popular pastime among some otaku is apparently to take popular music, be it anime theme songs, Jpop songs, etc., and substitute in Vocaloid-created vocals instead of the original vocals.  Well, one otaku took this one step further.  He or she took K-ON!’s opening theme, “Cagayake! Girls” and Vocaloided (is that a verb?  If not I declare that it should be) the lyrics using Hatsune Miku’s voice.  But they didn’t stop there, oh no!  They went on to create a new version of the K-ON! opening animation, featuring the Vocaloid characters instead of the usual cast.  The animation is spot-on accurate to the original.  They even did a good job (IMHO) in matching the various Vocaloids to whatever K-ON! character they were replacing.  I cannot imagine how much effort this took.

Check it out on YouTube or via the embedded player below.  Enjoy!

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