Aside from my exploits in Rock Band, I hardly consider myself to be a
good singer. Maybe that’s why so many artists have also turned to
Autotune, but it looks like Yamaha is stepping up to a whole new level
of artificial singing with its Vocaloid Keyboard. You literally “play”
out the vocal sounds.
Most of the setup looks like a regular electronic keyboard,
but there are some extra buttons along the left side that correspond to
certain sounds in Japanese. By combining those buttons with the regular
keys on the keyboard, a person is able to sound out just about any word
in Japanese, combining them with the notes and chords on the keyboard
to achieve the sound they’d like. The net result is an incredibly creepy
robot-like singer.
To make sure that the musician is getting the words he or she
desires, there is an electronic display on the keyboard that shows the
generated words in katakana. I imagine this could be translated into
other languages, but Yamaha’s Vocaloid Keyboard is currently only
available in Japanese… and when I say “available,” I mean not available,
because Yamaha has no intention of launching this as a commercial
product just yet.