A recent video on Nico Nico Douga has the voice of singer-songwriter Utada Hikaru (aka Hikki) singing Kokoro, the song sung by Vocaloid Kagamine Rin. What is this about?
Turns out that somebody sampled Utada Hikaru's singing voice, and extracted the tones so that they can be used to make voice sung songs using a program called Jinriki VOCALOID (人力VOCALOID, literally man-powered VOCALOID).
The video can be found here on Nico Nico Douga.
But don't worry if you do not have a Nico Nico account; somebody has uploaded the video on YouTube as well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N-ALWOcPyg
While the voice still sounds a bit robot-like as other Vocaloids do, one can definitely hear Utada Hikaru's voice there. Some may like it, some may not. Utada Hikaru herself has praised the uploader for the effort on twitter.
Utada Hikaru is on an indefinite hiatus from her music career. It surprised me a little that she actually made a respond on the user-made video using her voice, but a positive one too. Even though I don't listen to songs so much nowadays, I really like her older songs like Automatic and Movin' on Without You. Ah the good ol' days of J-Pop, how I miss you so much!
Nice. I heard about this, but had no nico account to view it.
ReplyDeleteJ-pop? It's time to jump on the k-wave dude. ;)
WC
@ WC:
ReplyDeleteNico Nico Douga can feel like a whole different world out there. It won't hurt to sign up, but since a lot of videos from there do get uploaded again on YouTube I suppose you can still see a lot of fuzz from the other community that way (as well as via other blogs/websites).
Ah yes K-pop does seem to take the lead recently, and it even managed to hit the Japanese market very well. Perhaps times really have changed nowadays. ^^;