Chinese Phonetics

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The following is a tutorial made for VOCALOID fans by fellow VOCALOID fans.

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About

Within China itself, there are many different languages that are members of the Sinitic Language Family, including Mandarin, Cantonese, Yin, and so on. Despite these acting as different languages, they are known in English as "dialects." There are many regional dialects of the official "dialects" of Chinese.

The official language of the People's Republic of China is Mandarin, due to Mandarin being a wide-spread dialect and the dialect that officials would use in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Mandarin is not mutually intelligible with the other dialects, as the other dialects are actually different languages. The language itself originated from Northern China and spread over time. Mandarin is spoken by 70% of all Chinese within China. When taken as a whole there are an estimated 1 billion Mandarin speakers, the most of any language in the world. When a VOCALOID is said to have a "Chinese Voicebank", it refers to having a voicebank in Mandarin. Common forms of this language is also considered the Lingua franca of China.

Mandarin Chinese has 21 consonants and 16 vowels. They can be combined together to create over 400 mono-syllabic sounds. As a tonal language, Mandarin Chinese also have 4 main tones and a neutral tone that changes the meaning of a word depending on the tone. However, tones are usually ignored when composing lyrics.

Due to how widespread the language is, it has influenced a number of languages around the area of China, having an influence on both Korean Phonetics and Japanese Phonetics.

Notes on Accents

Despite the general belief that singers completely lose their accents when they sing, this is not the case in every instance 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 - they may even adopt an accent that isn't their own for singing. Samples include genres such as western or country, black music such as Jazz or Soul. Singing also uses different muscles to speech, resulting in difference of air pressure and way the throat moves. Genres such as Opera are most likely to make a accent appear almost entirely absent thanks to the impact of the opera vibrato.

VOCALOID will capture any form of accent quite easily at times. It depends on the recording method used on the voicer, type of sound being recorded per sample (accent impact varies per sample and language) and overall number of samples that make up the voicebank (the more samples, the more chance of it slipping in).

Mandarin is noted for having hundreds of variations on the language within different localized areas. This is contributed to the large number of speakers and the widespread nature of the Chinese language and circumstances behind the area.

Mainland Accents

The phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of China, is modeled on Beijing Mandarin. This is the version of Mandarin that VOCALOID also uses.

• Luo Tianyi
• YANHE
• Yuezheng Ling
• Xingchen
• Yuezheng Longya
• Zhiyu Moke
• Mo Qingxian
• Zhang Chuchu
• Yuecheng

Taiwanese Accent

Standard Chinese is also spoken in Taiwan. The phonology is slightly different; many Taiwanese usually pronounce retroflex (zh, ch, sh) consonants as alveolar consonants (z, c, s) due to influence from Hokkien. When they do pronounce retroflex syllables (e.g. in formal situations), they pronounce them softer than in Mandarin based on the Beijing standard.

A Taiwanese speaker is not always understood by speakers from Mainland China due to differences in the accents, including different words being mistaken for each other.

• Xin Hua

Japanese Accent

Japanese-Mandarin 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 Mandarin-Chinese voicebanks. Therefore the Japanese-Mandarin accent is a non-native Mandarin accent, showing significant and notorious differences in comparison to the native Mandarin accents.

• Hatsune Miku

Phonetic chart

Symbol	Classification	IPA Symbol / Name	Pinyin	Notes
a	Final	ä	ba
o	Final	ɔ / u̯ɔ	po
7	Final	ɤ~ɯ̯ɤ	ke
i	Final	i	ji, yi
u	Final	u	fu, wu
y	Final	y	ju, qu, xu, nü, lü, yu
@`	Final	ɑɻ~ɚ	er
i\	Final	ɨ	zi, ci, si
i`	Final	ɨ˞	zhi, chi, shi, ri
aI	Final	aɪ̯	sai
ei	Final	eɪ̯	fei
AU	Final	ɑʊ̯	hao
@U	Final	ɤʊ̯	hou
ia	Final	i̯ä	xia, ya
iE_r	Final	i̯e̞	jie, ye
ua	Final	u̯ä	kua, wa
uo	Final	u̯ɔ	huo , wo
yE_r	Final	y̯e̞	jue, que, xue, nüe, lüe, yue
iAU	Final	i̯ɑʊ̯	xiao, yao
i@U	Final	i̯ɤʊ̯~i̯oʊ̯	jiu, you
uaI	Final	u̯aɪ̯	kuai, wai
uei	Final	u̯eɪ̯	gui, wei
a_n	Final	an	fan
@_n	Final	ən	fen
i_n	Final	in	xin, yin
iE_n	Final	i̯ɛn	qian, yan
ua_n	Final	u̯an	duan, wan
u@_n	Final	u̯ən	dun, wen
y_n	Final	yn	xun, yun
y{_n	Final	y̯ɛn~yan	xuan, yuan
AN	Final	ɑŋ	pang
@N	Final	əŋ~ɤŋ	beng
iN	Final	iŋ	xing, ying
iAN	Final	i̯ɑŋ	xiang, yang
uAN	Final	u̯ɑŋ	chuang, wang
u@N	Final	u̯əŋ~uɤŋ	weng
UN	Final	ʊŋ	dong
iUN	Final	i̯ʊŋ	xiong, yong
p	Initial	p	bo
p_h	Initial	pʰ	po
m	Initial	m	mo
f	Initial	f	fo
t	Initial	t	de
t_h	Initial	tʰ	te
n	Initial	n	ne
l	Initial	l	le
k	Initial	k	ge
k_h	Initial	kʰ	ke
x	Initial	x~	he
ts\	Initial	t͡ɕ	ji
ts\_h	Initial	t͡ɕʰ	qi
s\	Initial	ɕ	xi
ts`	Initial	ʈ͡ʂ	zhi
ts`_h	Initial	ʈ͡ʂʰ	chi
s`	Initial	ʂ	shi
z`	Initial	ɻ~ʐ	ri
ts	Initial	t͡s	zi
ts_h	Initial	t͡sʰ	ci
s	Initial	s	si

Continued development

As of 2018, Chinese is considered the second most popular language and has the third largest voicebank selection on offer.

However, there is still much unknown about these voicebanks at this time.

Chinese VOCALOIDs were held back in VOCALOID3 at a point by the events of the VOCALOID CHINA and Ren Li incident, which caused a overall delay in the release of the Shanghai HENIAN Information Technology Co. Ltd. vocals that impacted the VOCALOID CHINA cast.

With the events resolved and developments resumed, for VOCALOID4 the number of released vocals was seven in total (Xingchen, Yuezheng Longya, Xin Hua, Hatsune Miku, Luo Tianyi, Zhiyu Moke, and Mo Qingxian, some of which receiving more then 1 voicebank) which was a vast increase over VOCALOID3. Even with Hatsune Miku V4 Chinese removed from the equation, the number of native Chinese voicebanks still was greater than native English voicebanks in that era (CYBER DIVA, RUBY, DEX, DAINA, and CYBER SONGMAN). While the number of total English voicebanks, including non-natives, was greater than the total of Chinese voicebanks and was by far nowhere near the number of Japanese releases, this was still a significant increase from VOCALOID3. However, later voicebanks were not necessarily equal in popularity in VOCALOID4 to the earlier releases.

Beijing Photek S&T Development Co., Ltd., the creator of Xingchen, have begun to develop Chinese voicebanks on another synthesizer, Synthesizer V, and it is unknown if this is a permanent departure from VOCALOID.