slinks back into my nerd blog
a update on me and my blog that nobody asked for:
so ive had just a teensie weensie bit of a brain malfunction in the year since ive last logged on due to various life/family/health circumstances i will not delve into, but I wanted to return to explain where I’ve been at in regards to this hobby and give some closure (to myself mostly)
I guess there are two main reasons (besides personal issues) behind why I stopped posting:
The hobby itself has changed. I’ve always really liked getting into the nitty gritty of vocal synths and slaving away at the details. When Vocaloid 5 flopped and brought about the end of an era, it ushered in a new age of vocal synthesis. I am extremely impressed with how far the technology has come in the past couple years, with the synthv AI voices being pretty much indistinguishable from real singing, it’s an amazing technical feat. That said, AI vocal synths are something I personally don’t really enjoy or have interest in. The first, most obvious reason is that as a cover artist, it leaves me with nothing to do but plug & play. The second, more subjective reason is that for me, AI voices feel like the uncanny valley of singing. For example, with vocaloid, it was abundantly obvious that the vocals were synthesized, and through that, it was possible to hear the artist’s hand. Vocaloid was such a blank slate that all the changes an artist made really stood out and allowed for a variety of personalized, unique sounds, even when using the same voice. I always really valued that and I think it made the concept of “you sing through the voicaloid” very real and personal. The rise of AI voice banks (while they sound nice & I’m sure there are still some ways to infuse unique elements) sucks a lot of that life and uniqueness out of the process. To me, it feels impersonal and repetitive. Due to this, my interest in keeping up with the the trends has waned.
In the past year I’ve decided to focus more on women’s art, and with nearly all of the vocaloid-p’s being men, that’s something I can’t get from vocaloid. Like many things in life, it’s unarguably a boy’s club. While I’ve discovered lots of songs that will always be special to me, I personally feel it’s important to my values to pursue other music where I can support female artists, so I’ve unsubbed from the male vocaloid producers I used to follow (which was all but 2 of them). I understand this might seem extreme to most people, but it’s something I’ve thought deeply about.
Where does that leave this blog & my youtube channel?
I’m not totally sure where I will go from here, but if nothing else, I have at least 2 covers that I left near-finished that I want to complete and post. One is a gumi english cover of a Nashimoto song I wrote english lyrics for that I’m proud of, and one is an Avanna cover of Zombie by the cranberries. I think I will always maintain an interest in older vocal synths, so I probably will continue to occasionally find older mainstream songs to cover with ancient vocal synths, as is my calling apparently lol.
The last thing I wanna say is that I’ve extremely grateful for everyone I got to meet through this hobby so far, and for everyone who has shown me support through the years. I’m especially grateful to have met some very good friends here who I sincerely apologize for not keeping in better contact with. It’s something I struggle with (especially in times of poor mental health), and is not a reflection of any negative feelings whatsoever.
Anyway, that seems like a weird place to end this, but I can’t think of anything else to say. Concluding statement: [e n d] [ph @U s t]
