【RANDOM OBSCURE UKGK TRIVIA OF THE WEEK 2 YEARS AGO】 PART 1
This has been on the cutting room floor of my drafts for over a year now because can’t work up the motivation get the attention span to discover and document EVERY part of the Vocaloid fandom that thrived from the creation of UKGK directly and the formatting keeps breaking, so this is just part 1.
sorry for mistakes or repetition in this post, I don't know if the tumblr app will let me edit this once its posted, I just think the friendly history and crossovers between the UKGK and Vocaloid fandom are neat.
THE TOKU SERIES (HISTORY OF DEFOKO)
The Toku series is a .dll and ghost for SSP (incompatible with crow and materia) that makes it possible to have a fully voiced talking ghost on your desktop using the default AquesTalk text-to-speech library. There are four types of engine versions: AquesTalk, AquesTalk2, AquesTalk pico and AquesTalk10.
You might recognise her design even though she’s a fairly obscure ghost if you’re a Vocaloid listener because of UTAUloid, her design and voice are almost identical to the first default UTAU, Defoko who was released on March 6th, 2008.
but Toku (ukagaka) predates the existence of Defoko and UTAU altogether and was a big inspiration to the creation of UTAU.
The creator of Defoko / Uta Utane and UTAU, Ameya-p states on their blog that there’s minor design adjustments
Defoko’s first design is often incorrectly attributed on English Vocaloid fan wikis to Inuhebi-p because of this video uploaded on June 4th, 2008
Ameya (and Inuhebi-p?) borrowed Toku’s basic Ukagaka design but added a beret [x]
Defoko’s hair length is closer to a short bob than a semi-long mullet
Ameya’s redesign adds that Toku’s robot ears become a headset to make her more like a Vocaloid
the major technical difference is that Toku uses text-to-speech rather than a vocal synthesiser
Toku’s official ghost was designed using a freeware dressup program called “Nantoka”, which was created so that people who aren’t artists can make their own Ukagaka ghosts! (I believe most early utauloids and vipperloids also used this software too but Defoko's design was expanded beyond the default options in it)
Both still sample edited versions of the default AquesTalk “female 1 voice” (which will also sound familiar to Touhou and Pop'n Music fans due to Yukkuri Reimu and TILT)
Early references for Uta Utane (Defoko)
To make this slightly easier to comprehend (but still confusing for me trying to proofread my own draft and seeing I mixed them up...)
AquesTone = VSTi plugin (singing) -> 2 (4) variations of AquesTone
AquesTalk = tool (text to speech) -> 4 variations of AquesTalk (x / AquesTalk 女声1 - Vocaloid Database)
Contrary to VOCALOID voicebanks (and most UTAU voicebanks) that are sampled from real singers, AquesTalk is purely synthetic
