Japanese Phonetics

The followings are lists of phonemes needed to make the Vocaloid sing in Japanese.

Special note: this Japanese phonetic list is taken from help file of Vocaloid2 developed by Crypton Future Media. There are 41 phonetic pronounications which make up the Japanese Vocaloid library, these phonetic inputs will use any set of the estimated 500 diphonetic samples needed for Japanese recreation (Vocaloid uses approx 1,300 samples for Japanese overall).

Additional notes

 * Crypton’s Vocaloids, including Kaito and Meiko, have almost the same Japanese phonetic system. To use z, Z, h\, N and N' , users need to edit the phonemes, not entering kana-characters.
 * Rin/Len Kagamine Act 1 can pronounce h\ while their Act 2 cannot (comparison of consonant sounds Act 1, Act 2).


 * Vocaloids of Internet Co. Ltd., such as Gackpoid or Megpoid, mostly share the same system as Crypton’s, but they do not have z and Z sounds. As is often the case with the Japanese language, they are replaced by dz and dZ.
 * Commonly h\ sound works only in h\ e(ぇ, xe) and h\ o(ぉ, xo).
 * Japanese VOCALOID2 voicebanks can combine a and i phonemes (eg. w a i) but not with the original VOCALOID voicebanks. The workaround is to simply use the y consonant. (w a j)
 * N\, N or n alone tends to be pronounced as "ng". This is the basis for Japanese vocaloids being used for South-East Asian languages.
 * N' followed by a vowel may produce odd results, however, due to its use within the Japanese language there is no actual call for this phonetic to be followed by a vowel sound anyway.
 * However, some SEA languages have a different way of pronouncing "u", which is different from the Japanese. Only Miku, Gackpoid and Iroha can pronounce "u" closer to the way SEA languages do.