Vocaloid

Vocaloid is software that is developed by Yamaha for composers, producers and music lovers. It turns typed lyrics and a melody into a synthesized singing voice, so a vocal line can be created without a human singer. There are different engine versions, from the first release in 2004 to the current VOCALOID6. It runs on both Windows and Mac.

Features:

• Sings in Japanese, English and Chinese in VOCALOID6; earlier engines also added Korean, Spanish and Catalan.
• Is available in both male and female voices.
• Leon, Lola, Miriam, Meiko and Kaito are the early voice banks developed for the first engine.
• Leon and Lola won the 2005 Electronic Musician Editor's Choice award.
• A piano roll score editor lets users enter notes and lyrics and fine-tune expression parameters.
• There are more than 100 style presets and 11 audio effects in VOCALOID6.

Vocaloid lets musicians create sung vocal parts from lyrics and a melody without recording a human singer.

Vocaloid is entirely a commercial product, and a free trial of the editor is available. It is a straightforward and useful tool for a musician who needs a vocal line. Users input the melody and lyrics into the software and adjust the available parameters to get the tune and expression they need. The engine uses concatenative synthesis, splicing short fragments of recorded singing, and VOCALOID6 adds the VOCALOID:AI technology.

Voice banks are built from recordings of real singers, and Yamaha has even used the technology to recreate the voice of a deceased musician. The English voice banks Leon, Lola and Miriam were developed by Zero-G. The Japanese voices Meiko and Kaito were made by Yamaha and sold by Crypton Future Media.

VOCALOID6 comes with four VOCALOID5-compatible voicebanks (Amy, Chris, Kaori and Ken) plus its own VOCALOID:AI voices. Many voice banks, such as Hatsune Miku, are sold with anime-style character art. It makes composing simple by typing the lyrics, which are automatically converted to singing, and the result can be adjusted with parameters such as pitch, dynamics and vibrato. The editor also works as a VST3 or AU plug-in in a DAW.