SONiKA

SONiKA is an English VOCALOID developed and distributed by Zero-G Limited, and was released in July 2009 for the VOCALOID2 engine. SONiKA is advertised as a "virtual vocalist modeled on the voice of a young girl pop singer"; her voice provider has never been revealed.

Concept
She is the first native English speaking VOCALOID to use a character design and profile as part of the product. SONiKA was released with profile/biographical information on the back cover of the software package, similar to the other VOCALOID2 products. Her personality also shows in her "tweets".

It was stated in the live stream for Dex and Daina that Sonika was an experiment.

Etymology
The name "Sonika" is Hindi, a girl's name based on the Hindi word for "golden beauty", and was likely chosen due to a resemblance to "sonic" (relating to sound).

Appearance
According to her twitter messages, SONiKA's hair color is able to change color (e.g. from green to red), she also has freckles that show in the summer heat.

The tattoo on her left side is her name in katakana as " ソニカ ".

Relations
SONiKA is the first VOCALOID to coin the concept of "the Vocaloid family". This was previously a fan concept that accepts all VOCALOIDs as a form of undefined "family". SONiKA, however, became more definite on how she was related to certain VOCALOIDs.


 * SONiKA regards LEON, LOLA and MIRIAM as her older siblings
 * Prima as her "auntie"
 * Tonio as her "uncle"
 * She referred to BIG AL as "her best friend" when asked about which VOCALOID she talked to the most.
 * All other VOCALOIDs are referred to as her cousins.

In regards to VOCALOID3 she was glad to be getting more brothers and sisters, and stated she was looking forward to meeting her new friends and singing along side them.

Music featuring SONiKA
Examples of usage

Marketing
Prior to SONiKA, Zero-G did not do much to market their VOCALOIDs, since they sold based on reputation of their products to a strictly professional market and most marketing was done via traditional means (such as software reviews). Unlike past VOCALOIDs, SONiKA was a more fandom driven VOCALOID. Rather than target professionals, Zero-G focused on selling SONiKA to the VOCALOID fans. This produced in both positive and negative results, with the most important advantage being that Zero-G was able to create links with the VOCALOID English fandom that never existed previously. The downside was that any disappointments around SONiKA were more felt than with previous VOCALOIDs they had made since they were talking to the fans of VOCALOID software directly.

Trivia

 * The winner of SONiKA's New Look Competition was entry number 30.


 * The artist of SONiKA's 2nd boxart design has a DeviantART account, as does the artist for the comics.


 * Although she was not the first English VOCALOID to use an avatar on her boxart, she was the first to mimic the Japanese style of avatars.


 * An old trick within the Western VOCALOID fandom is to have Luka and SONiKA sing together when using English. If correctly done both voices will blend together. The advantage of this is both VOCALOIDs effectively hide each others flaws.