Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Vocaloid Quick Tip: Lengthening Vowel Sounds in Short Words

Hey everyone, Satoshi here with a quick tip! Have you noticed that words less than a quarter note in length that end in a hard consonant such as D or T will abruptly end the vowel sound sooner than you want it to?

There are a couple of ways to get around that problem. One, you can make sure that the next word is immediately connected to the first word-- with no gap at all. That helps the Vocaloid continue the two sounds. However, there are many cases where you want a slight pause between the two words.

For a word such as and, this is a problem. I keep telling Megumi not to cut off the note, but she just shrugs her shoulders at me and says, "That's the way I am!"

Even if it is longer than a quarter note, if it is standing by itself, the vowel sound is abruptly shortened. And again, in many cases, you want there to be a slight pause before the next word.

So what to do? Break the word into two pieces. Normally, you would enter and as one word, and it will have this phoneme:

{ n d

But, if you break the word into two parts with the first part just being the a vowel sound:

{

followed by

- { n d

In the second part, you can see the word AND is
broken into two separate parts and joined together
you will have a smooth vowel sound for the entire length of the word, even if it is shorter than a quarter note. Don't forget the hyphen in front to tell Vocaloid that you are connecting the two vowel sounds.

Here is what it sounds like. The first part is just the single word and. The second part is the word broken into two pieces, but joined together. Both are the same length. Both have the same gap space before the next word I. Can you hear the difference?

Hope this tip helps. Keep rocking!

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