VOCALOID

Vocaloid is a singing synthesizer application software developed by the Yamaha Corporation.

History
The first Vocaloids, Leon and Lola, were released by the studio Zero-G on March 3, 2004, both of which were sold as a "Virtual Soul Vocalist". Leon and Lola made their first appearance at the at the NAMM Show on January 15, 2004. Leon and Lola were also demonstrated at the Zero-G Limited booth during Wired Nextfest and won the 2005 Electronic Musician Editor's Choice Award. Zero-G later released Miriam, with her voice provided by Miriam Stockley, in July 2004. Later that year, Crypton Future Media also released their first Vocaloid Meiko. Though Leon, Lola, Miriam and Meiko experienced good sales, Kaito was the only one who initially failed commercially. After interest in Vocaloids grew, Zero-G began reselling their Vocaloid products again on their website, and were considering to update their box art to match current Vocaloid trends better.

Additional notes
The voice banks for Vocaloid are also more fluid, and can be shaped easier. Vocaloid however has just 5 voicebanks offered to it (3 English, 2 Japanese), offering a limited range of voices. They cover soul, pop and J-pop music between them. Other genres are possible to achieve by users with further voice editing. As seen with voicebanks like Leon, different users can utilize the voicebanks offered very differently and Vocaloid has produced a wide range of different results from the same few voicebanks even without heavy editing. Also, locating the correct phonemes on its database is much simpler than the Vocaloid 2 engine that followed, making the program easier for users to use. Because of its more flexible and simple nature, there are many users still working with the dated software. However, Vocaloid is hard to make sound realistic, even though it is easy to edit. It has a much more digital sound then later engines without skilled editing. Leon and Lola, the very first Vocaloids, noticeably show this digital sound more so than the other 3 voicebanks Miriam, Meiko and Kaito. It also has difficulties with pronunciation of words, the English voicebanks being the worst of two languages in this area. Vocaloid is confirmed incompatible with the Windows 7 operating system and while Vocaloid is suppose to be compatible with Windows Vista users have reported no major problems, though initially rumors stated otherwise. However, it cannot be guaranteed that Vocaloid will work with operating systems newer than Windows XP.

Marketing
Vocaloids were promoted at events such as the NAMM show. In fact, it was the promotion of Zero-G's Lola and Leon at the NAMM trade show that would later introduce PowerFX to the Vocaloid program.

Cultral Impact
Nico Nico Douga played a fundamental role in the recognition and popularity of the software. Soon after the release of the software, users of Nico Nico Douga started posting videos with songs created by the software. However, most of the use and overall popularity of the Vocaloid software would be tributed to the popularity of the Vocaloid 2 era voicebanks. This is partiularly true in the case of Kaito.

Featured music
It is difficult to know how many songs and albums are using the Vocaloid software since song writers must ask permission before being allowed to state specifically they are using a Vocaloid in their songs. The first album to be released using a Vocaloid was A Place in the Sun, which used Leon's voice for the vocals singing in both Russian and English. Miriam has also been featured in two albums, Light + Shade and Continua. Japanese electropop-artist Susumu Hirasawa used Vocaloid Lola in the original soundtrack of Paprika by Satoshi Kon.

Criticism
Earlier Vocaloids that were created not to have "Avatars", and Boxart was not important to the function of the program so while Meiko and Kaito had images that could later be used as avatars, Leon, Lola and Miriam (although there is a clear image of a person) did not. When avatars became common with Japanese Vocaloids, the English Vocaloids, without official avatars, were left to interpretation by fan artwork. Zero-G has since confirmed that they are interested in revising the boxart of their Vocaloids since interest in Vocaloids has greatly increased.

Early Vocaloid voicebanks were also criticised for their poor pronunciation problems, on top of this Leon and Lola were considered hard to make sound like their intended genders..