English Phonetics

English VOCALOIDs are VOCALOIDs that are capable of mimicking the English language much easier than VOCALOIDs of other languages. The following is a list of phonemes needed to make an English VOCALOID sing in English.

About
The English language has one of the greatest variations of dialect in the world. Thus, there is much more variety of pronunciation for English VOCALOIDs than VOCALOID such as those that sing in other languages.

The English language itself is made up of about 20 vowel sounds and 24 consonant sounds. Also, English doesn't have a systematic orthography, so there is not a one-to-one or near one-to-one match between letters and sounds as it happens with other languages like the Spanish or  Japanese,


 * Example. "W" can sound /w/ in "what" and /u:/ in "few", "Y" can sound /j/ in "yes" and /i/ in "play". There are also differences between spellings of words, such as those seen in British and American spellings of words such as "colour/color".

VOCALOID and VOCALOID2, uses American spelling for the lyrics. VOCALOID3 is confirmed to be capable of localisation, but it is unknown if it will open up the ability to have American and British spelling.

However the phonetic notation doesn't follow this, and instead uses the Received Pronunciation written in X-SAMPA, with some minor modifications when it's required, like its the case of the allophones.

English VOCALOIDs
Despite the general belief that singers lose their accents when they sing, this is not the case and an accent is possible to be heard even in singing vocals. However, the reason many are led to believe this is that there are several methods of training singers to disguise or otherwise hide their natural accents. Though the English language is not alone in the problems of accent as other languages may suffer from this same problem, English VOCALOIDs have proven to be difficult to avoid issues with accents. Even the first two VOCALOIDs in English, LEON and Lola, were noted their distinctly "British" accent. The result is that the accent has been known to aid or add difficulty to the use of synthesizing software and VOCALOID is no stranger to this effect. English VOCALOIDs have ended up with the most variation on how they sound out of all the current languages offered for the VOCALOID software so far produced.

The impact of the dialect/accent on English VOCALOIDs can result in a notorious variation of certain sounds, being notorious in the case of the diphthongs and rhotic vowels. Users who are not aware of the potential difficulty of accents may overlook odd pronunciations that need to be adjusted for better results. This is true for non-native based accents voicebanks more so, due the voice provider may have pronunciation issues with a non-native language.

In some instances, Producers may be found to have adjusted VSQ and VSQX files so heavily to make them work for 1 particular English VOCALOID that they become "VOCALOID specific" and are unable to work particularly well without further adjustments on other English VOCALOIDs. Cases like this are often rare in languages such as Japanese, though not foreign to them and many VSQ and VSQX files will work without too much adjusting.

British-English Accented
British-English accented VOCALOIDs were VOCALOIDs whose provider was known to have been of "British" nationality. As Great Britain is the main origin of English, British-English VOCALOIDs sing in a native English accent. Originally, they were the standard English accent type used to develop the English engine. British accented VOCALOIDs mostly came originally from Zero-G who worked solely with British artists to collect their vocal samples from.

''Note: The term 'British' applies to anyone from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and therefore the variation of the accent can differ greatly overall. The British Isles have the greatest variation of accents for English in the world per sq. mile of land. '' (For more information see Wikipedia.)


 * AVANNA
 * LEON
 * LOLA - (note; though she is regarded as having a "British" accent, Lola's accent reverts to her provider's natural Caribbean accent when not singing in ideal Soul music conditions)
 * OLIVER
 * SONiKA

American-English Accented
American accented VOCALOIDs have providers that came from the United States of America, and for this they are native speakers of the English language. Due to the fact there is only one American-English accented VOCALOID, practically there isn't any other voicebank to compare against it. The most notorious difference with the British accented voicebanks is in the rhotic vowels. This is because the British dialects usually are non-rhotic; in North America rhotic dialects of the English are predominant. (For more information see Wikipedia.)


 * Big Al

Due to the user base preference for this accent, PowerFX have confirmed since that YOHIOloid's vocal was made to have a American sounding ring to it. Hatsune Miku English also was made to match the American way of speaking by Crypton Future Media.

Australian Accented
Australian Accents are the normal English accent for individuals from Australia. This particular accent is normally very distinct compared to all other English accents, with features unique from all other English dialects. (For more information see Wikipedia.)


 * Sweet ANN - her provider "Jody" supposedly came from Australia.

South-African Accented
South African accents are accents belonging to individuals from South Africa. English was not a native language to Africa and was introduced during the colonisation of African countries by English colonist, resulting in the English language becoming widely used in South Africa itself as the general Lingua franca between regions. Variation in impact of native languages on the English language results in a large variation of strength and tone of the accent, though in general most South African accents resemble closely to South England accents in nature. (For more information see Wikipedia.)


 * Miriam

Japanese-English Accented
Japanese-English accented VOCALOIDs are produced by those who came from Japan. Their voice providers have the Japanese language as their native language, but were used to produce English voicebanks. Therefore the Japanese-English accent is a non-native English accent, showing significant and notorious differences in comparison to the native English accents. As more releases of such voicebanks have been produced by studios, common traits that are clearly able to be picked out amongst these vocals.

The major issue seen with Japanese accents is that they often struggle with distinction of some sounds. This usually happens because the providers and producing studios/companies aren't familiarized with these foreign sounds. Among the most common issues are:


 * Lack of distinction and stress in vowel sounds. These ones usually are either too tense or too lax, as the speaker tends to approximate the vowel sound to their 5-vowel system.
 * Lack of distinction in the liquids consonants (R & L). Luka's use of English to pronounce the words "Road Roller", which risks coming out as sounding like "roe rorora", is the most famous case.
 * Distortion of some sounds toward similar Japanese sounds. As example, the [f] phoneme pronounced as a bilabial fricative instead a labiodental fricative, as it should be.

These traits depends of the providers efficiency in English and the experience of the studio/company with the language. Despite this, Japanese-accented English VOCALOIDs still are a better option for mimicking the English language than use purely Japanese voicebank, having the wide array of phonemes and work-arounds available from the English phonetic system.


 * Megurine Luka (Yū Asakawa was competent in speaking English)
 * Hatsune Miku (Saki Fujita did not speak English at all prior to the voicebanks recording)
 * Kaito (Naoto Fūga has an unknown level of English)
 * Meiko (Meiko Haigō has an unknown level of English)
 * Megpoid (Megumi Nakajima has a good level of English)
 * Kagamine Rin/Len (not yet released; Asami Shimoda has been taking English lessons)
 * Macne Nana (voice provider fluent in English)

Korean-English accented
Korean-English accented VOCALOIDs are produced by those who come from South Korea. As there is only one unreleased VOCALOID voicebank with this accent, details cannot be released.

SeeU's Korean voicebank is an special case as it was given English phonemes to mimic the language to certain degree. However, this feature was left largely incomplete due deadline issues and again this does not produce quality results enough to comment on.


 * SeeU - A English Voicebank was set for production but is currently on hiatus as of Feb 2013.

Misc.

 * Prima - Accent unconfirmed
 * Tonio - Accent unconfirmed

Phonetic System's Characteristics
There are 52 phonetic pronunciations which make up the English VOCALOID library, these phonetic inputs will use any set of the estimated 2500 diphonetic samples, (VOCALOID uses a total of approx 8,500 samples altogether for English) needed for English recreation altogether. According to development notes on English GUMI, there were over 4,000 phonetic connections for that particular vocal alone ; a similar number is therefore likely for all English VOCALOIDs.

Vowels
The English phonetic system includes 3 types of vowels: monothongs, diphthongs and R-colored vowels. Being the nucleus of the syllable, the vowels can be encoded alone

Monothongs= Diphthongs= R-Colored Vowels=

The diphthongs and rhotic vowels tends to cause some problems for the user when they need to be extended across 2 or more notes if this one attempts to do it manually.

For work around this, the English voicebanks allows split the words in syllables across the notes using the hyphen symbol "-" within the lyrics.


 * Example: Remember_split.png

while in the case of extend a syllable across various notes is required a combination of hyphen '-' and slash '/' within the lyrics for state how many note will it last.


 * Example: Sound_extend_V2.png

In VOCALOID2's case, is obligatory use the hyphen/slash for effectively divide the words across the notes, unless the user prefer take the risk, working around this manually using phoneme replacement.

In the case of VOCALOID3, the task is easier as the [-] phoneme allows extend any kind of vowel it follows. The hyphen/slash still works, however this one simply adds the [-] phoneme when is required.


 * Example:Sound_extend_V3.png

Consonants
The Phonetic System also includes 31 consonants phonemes. From the English consonants only the plosives and the liquids have their allophones as their own phonemes, these ones are required for achieve a correct stress and pronunciation of the words.

Allophones
Plosives and their allophones= Liquids=

Phonetic List
Special note: This was the list is based in the Big Al's help file, complimented with the chart of VOCALOID-User.Net and expanded to include the IPA's symbols and names. However there were some incorrect entries within the released list. Entering some of the words provided here as examples for the phoneme usage will not result in the expected phonemes that were used for the list. In addition, the list did not indicate which particular letters the phoneme applied to; this section has underlined the relevant letters for the benefit of readers.

Phoneme Replacement
Due the big array of allophones and similar sounding phonemes available in the English Language, this allows a great flexibility for replacing the phonemes. This has a lot of applications, like altering the emphasis or stress of a word, correcting a strange pronunciation found in a voicebank, alter the accent or general pronunciation of a particular VOCALOID, etc.

This added to some auxiliar phonemes allows a great diversity of combinations and possibilities to experiment. However, the user must consider the results may vary between the different voicebanks due the individual differences like accent, pronunciation and samples' quality present in the voicebank. The most recommended is take these tips as a guide and experiment by yourself.

Consonant Replacement= Vowel Replacement= Diphthong/Rhotic Vowel Replacement=