Talk:Anon & kanon/@comment-98.171.201.182-20171206195208/@comment-53539-20171207043735

The only reason Gumi is not criticised is she was the first of the type to be entered into the engine. Sadly the fans forget that Vocaloid is based on real life, for vocaloids to sound alike, this is simply because people in real life can sound alike.

A lot of the problem wasn't really noticed until Vocaloid3, when we were swamped by lots of new vocaloids. With the new wave of vocaloids the "common" trope began to form among the females, as most of the vocals coming in were this.

Despite all things considered, all human beings have the same variant of voicebox in their throat. Size of the throat, gender (especially this one!), language, etc changes it slightly, but its the same design at the end of the day regardless of the individual. Ergo, sooner or later you get two individuals who are capable of mimicking each other to a tee.

However, as with vocaloid itself despite the similarities there are always things unique. For the most part each voicebank has its own set of samples which contain unique elements among them. These samples help define how the voice behaves in terms of characteristics. It was noted in Lumi in particular that not all vocaloid have a full set of unique samples per library, however, and many re-use samples from past libraries (Crypton are known to do this, the best example is Luka English V4x). This further limits the uniqueness among voicebanks themselves on top of the lack of uniqueness that maybe in vocaloids themselves.

The current Vocaloid4 vocals have been recorded to allow far more unique traits to leak out.

When Vocaloid2 was coming to an end, new vocaloids like VY2 were being accused of sounding like X vocaloid or Y vocaloid. However, when the problem esculated in Vocaloid3 there was a lot of knee-jerk reactions, especially in Vocaloid Otaku forums. We had stages where both design and vocal were pulled up as "being unique and looking/sounding like no past vocaloid" when in reality both things were not true. So fans were having a go at fans for both things, even though the concern was legit. We know now that SeeU was copying Miku, as one of the early concepts has her using Miku's pose, we know Chika had issues sounding like Gui and it impacted her.

I however, agree with Gumi being pretty average at this stage. The vocaloid most try and claim isn't suffering from average vocal syndrome is Meiko, but Meiko is also in a common vocal group with Lily and a few others. Their all vocals which are common in real life, therefore will be common in vocaloid. IT is not a bad thing, as the problems been acknowledged and is being addressed. Current vocaloids being released now sound like two or three vocaloids in one voicebank, producing a Vocaloid with mixed results. One of the reasons older vocaloids like Gumi or even Miku require more voicebanks is that they are from an older era and often their vocal ranges are not so wide. So their way of making them more variant and unique is to expand their voicebanks for XSY.