[October 29, 2014]

Yamaha's Unique Technology "VOCALOIDTM" Brings Back a Singing Voice from the Past

Yamaha (News - Alert) Corporation announces that, using its unique technology, it has re-created the singing voice of deceased Japanese musician "hide," and one of his unrecorded and unreleased songs has been recorded on CDs available for purchase.

The Japanese singer hide passed away in 1998. Especially in Japan, he is regarded as a musical legend, and his songs are still very popular. Just prior to his passing, hide wrote a poignant song entitled "Co GAL." However, the song was never released because of hide's sudden death just prior to its scheduled recording.

Sixteen years after hide's death, Yamaha received a request from UNIVERSAL MUSIC JAPAN and re-created hide's singing voice and realized the vocal part of the song using its unique singing voice synthesizer technology "VOCALOID."

Yamaha analyzed in detail the massive amount of digital vocal data that hide recorded during his lifetime and extracted the necessary samples of his singing voice to re-create his voice using VOCALOID. Next, Yamaha used its unique voice quality modificatin technology to generate recordings of hide's singing voice as close to the original as possible, and then went on to prepare the vocal part of the unreleased song. This re-creation of hide's voice then underwent further modifications by I.N.A., who was hide's co-producer and close working associate during his lifetime, and the job of re-creating hide's voice was complete.

The finished version of the re-created song is scheduled to be released in Japan by UNIVERSAL MUSIC JAPAN on December 10 (Japan standard time) this year. The re-created song will be made available to hide's fans in a recorded album of songs entitled "Co GAL," commemorating the 50th year since his birth.

Mr. Hideki Kenmochi, VOCALOID Project Leader, Business Development Division, Yamaha Corporation, commented, "I think it is a great honor for us at Yamaha to be called up to use our technology to re-create the singing voice of a great musician who left us so many great songs and recordings. We will be very happy if this project contributes to the development of musical culture.

About VOCALOID^TM
VOCALOID* is a singing voice synthesizer technology and its software applications, which were developed by Yamaha. Voices are synthesized by extracting voice sounds, which are called voice fragments, from the actual recordings of singers and connecting these in series. For general use, software and other related items are available for PC use, and music vocals can be produced by simply entering lyrics and a melody in the computer. VOCALOID is available in Japanese, English, Spanish, Chinese, and Korean.
Please access http://www.vocaloid.com/en/

*VOCALOID is a trademark of Yamaha Corporation.

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