Japanese VOCALOIDs can use a standard YAMAHA script.
However, that does not mean a user does not have to check all vocal results at all for any weakness in the voicebanks vocal performance and pronunciation, as that is never advisable at all. Often it is possible to use VSQ, VSQX or VPR files for any Japanese Vocaloid, with sometimes only slight tweaks here and there overall. This makes them also fairly simple to tune as a result. In other languages, though it may be common for "ma" to be a weakness, it may not be a weakness in every example, making them much less predictable and consistent. Once a producer learns something, such as the weakness of the sound "ma" in Hatsune Miku's VOCALOID2 vocal, you can easily pick up on such as weakness every single time. They can often be easier to edit, fix and adjust because of this overall because the result of the limitation variation is much more consistency's and predictabilities within each voicebanks. While this means the Japanese voicebanks are often among the most consistent and stable, they can suffer due to the repetition of their limited number of sounds. There is simply no need for many variable of certain sounds such as "ma", "do", etc, so far less diaphones and triphones are needed overall, with some sounds being largely the same if they are at the beginning, middle or end of a word. In addition as a contrast to languages as English or Spanish Phonetics, there is less overall variation of sounds, which means the manner a voicebank says a certain sound will often be identical every single time. Īnother issue is that when a Japanese voicebank says a certain word, there is no work around like with larger language voicebanks. As a result, VOCALOID4 and later Japanese voicebanks often do not behave the same even when they sound similar and have far more quirks and characteristics then pre-VOCALOID4 ones.
A new recording technique was introduced for VOCALOID4 by Internet Co., Ltd., allowing to capture more traits. This especially impacted VOCALOID3, as this engine introduced the largest number of new Japanese voicebanks and common "vocal types" began to form especially among the female voicebanks. This leads to Japanese VOCALOIDs at times having very little variation in how they sound. One downside to the language is that during recording, less overall traits can be captured with certain recording techniques. Japanese is one of the cheapest and fastest languages to produce for VOCALOID overall, with even multi-voicebank releases seeing their provider spend no more time in the studio than approximately a week. In addition, development occurs significantly faster due to the lesser amount of sounds required. This made updating the voicebanks fairly easy from VOCALOID2 to VOCALOID3 or VOCALOID4. In addition, sounds such as diaphones and triphones often get acquired from recording data used for the languages main sounds, as a result when triphones were introduced in VOCALOID3, old voicebanks already had recorded the necessary triphones. The language is fairly straight forward to produce as most sounds are more definite than with languages such as English. The result is that Japanese voicebanks are some of the simplest to make for VOCALOID, as the sounds simply have to be correct and errors in Japanese language skills often are minimum, being a result of general bugs, glitches and the odd mispronunciations. However, the lack of influence from other languages, in addition Japan's isolation from the rest of the world, has contributed much to the precision of the Japanese phonetic system.įar less new sounds entered the language for many centuries, in comparison to other languages such as English which had heavy influences from other languages.ĭue to lack of influence and the isolation of the language, this has worked in favour of the language within VOCALOID. More modern decades have seen many European influences on the language, especially many English loanwords having been adopted into the Japanese phonetic system. Its main influences are Chinese and Old Japanese. The origin of the language is mostly unknown, including when it first appeared in Japan.