Yamaha Vocaloid Keyboard Lets You Do Live Vocal Synthesis

Yamaha has created a unique synthesizer, Vocaloid Keyboard, which is designed for real-time vocal synthesis using Vocaloid.

The proof-of-concept keyboard is optimized for entering Japanese characters with one hand. It has 16 buttons, for consonants, vowels, and the two types of voicing marks. The user enters those with the left hard, while playing notes with the right. This makes it possible to synthesize singing using the hardware alone.

The entered text and the pronounced text are shown in katakana on the LED display, so you can check that the content played is correct. There are also three parameter knobs, which you can use to adjust the vocal sound.

Users of the Vocaloid software can’t give live Vocaloid performances yet. But with this system, users can do realtime vocal synthesis. Translating Vocaloid to a keyboard could simplify and streamline vocal synthesis.

At this point, Vocaloid is a design concept, there are no plans to release this as a product yet.

via Diginfonews

12 thoughts on “Yamaha Vocaloid Keyboard Lets You Do Live Vocal Synthesis

  1. lol, for me, that would be utterly useless, but I find it a really charming little device. Props to Yamaha for that little oddity, even if it isn’t going commercial.

  2. Typing and playing music at the same time seems very complex, although you never know until you try it. I wonder if they tried sticking a microphone and voice recognition on it yet making some sort of advanced vocoder.

  3. Might be easier to set up a sequence of syllables first, then have them triggered in order by the keys for pitch, volume and length info. Or have syllables on one midi channel and the synth on another to sequence them.

  4. That flashing/blinking screen would cause me to go blind.

    … and on that note, does this mean we will hear this crap in techno music for the next 5 years?

  5. The translator of this video has made an interesting change. At 2:14 in the video there are the following subtitles: “Also, we know from interviews that some users have bought DAW software, but find it hard to use.” What the guy actually says in Japanese is that “many women have bought DTM software, but cannot play music with it, because it’s difficult to use.” A comment like this is only possible in Japan. 😉

  6. Haha gotta love that Japanese male chauvinism.

    Anyway, the text entry mechanism is really remarkable. Unfortunately it relies heavily on the fact that Japanese syllables are seriously constrained in number and shape (as you can see, a vowel and a consonant key pressed at the same time is enough to fully identify a syllable), so it wouldn’t work with English, or most languages around for that matter.

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