⭒⁎ Utauloids, Vocaloids, & the New Kasane Teto Voicebank ⁎⭒

---

This April, the utauloid Kasane Teto finally got an official voicebank for SynthV, and I honestly love how it sounds. It’s less robotic than her other voicebanks, which can be a good or bad thing depending on the songs and the sound the producer wants, but I think this a natural option is great to have.

…There's a lot to explain for those who have little to no knowledge on this, so some things may go undefined for the sake of brevity. I’ll try my best to explain just enough about utauloids/vocaloids for the unfamiliar so this news makes some sense.

A vocaloid is a speech synthesizer, which is a collection of sounds and parts of human speech that people can manipulate to make fake speech. You actually (probably) hear speech synthesizers regularly, such as on public transit announcements or in TTS (text-to-speech) software. With vocaloid specifically, these parts of speech are used to create singers, where the voice providers’ voice (a.k.a the real human behind the synthesizer) is compiled into a voicebank. These voicebanks are the vocaloid, but most vocaloids have a character attached to the voicebank, such as the famous Hatsune Miku!

Now is a good time to mention that “Vocaloid'' (to my understanding) actually refers to a software, which is owned by Yamaha Corporation. Although, when most people talk about vocaloid/vocaloids, they aren't actually talking about the software, but the voicebanks/characters themselves. Vocaloid has become a term to describe this type of japanese singing voicebanks, basically.

But, the term Utauloid refers to a type of fanmade voicebank, rather than linking back to a specific company’s software. To my understanding, an Utauloid works the same as a Vocaloid in that they are both speech synthesizers (so they are made the same way), but an Utauloid can be made by anyone while a Vocaloid can only be made by Yamaha. Usually, Utauloids have a more “robotic” sound to them, since most of the time they aren't made by professionals using professional equipment and synthesizers. They also can be harder for producers to work with apparently, as it takes more time to create a good sound with Utauloids due to lower overall quality.

So, when Kasane Teto (probably the most well-known Utauloid, who got her start as an April fools prank actually) got an official voicebank, it made news. Technically this voicebank isn't a vocaloid voicebank since it was released for Synthesizer V Studio (not owned by Yamaha), but compared to her UTAU voicebanks it sounds pretty similar. I put a comparison video below where they showcase one of her UTAU voicebanks to the new SynthV one, and even if you’ve never heard Teto before the difference should be clear! 

*The tuning on this is not great, the tearing/difficulty hitting the high note is a technical problem on the side of the producet, but it gets the point across.

---

**also a side note: teto's new voicebank (left) is represented with a different costume than the old one (right), so when producers use this voicebank they tend to have any accompanying art with Teto match with her outfit

---

The SynthV voicebank has some kind of AI element, but honestly at this point I'm too confused to look into exactly how that works. It makes for a really human sound to her voice, though, which is really cool! Before I found out that Teto got a SynthV voicebank, I had accidentally listened to a song using it, and got so confused trying to figure out if it was a human cover or a voicebank, lol. I imagine that these AI voicebanks make for some really cool singers, though the occasional “weird” noises it makes is a bit off-putting. I believe this can be fixed overtime though, as the models get smarter at making human noises or are even made to be more artificial/robotic sounding like the original UTAU.

I'll leave you with a link to the aforementioned song here. Maybe not the song I would recommend listening to if you're not interested in vocaloids/utauloids, but it holds a lot of nostalgia for me which is why I listen to many covers/versions of it :,)

---