Oh you have come to the right address. I am by no means an OG in this genre (started listening in 2022), so I'm not an expert, but I do know enough to tell strangers about it :).
You will now be subjected to an introduction to vocaloid music. Please take the time to maybe at least listen to one song pretty please🥺🥺🥺??????
Don't read any of this go listen to the songs first you nerd
Long text about the history of vocaloid which is way too long don't read it
(I pulled this straight out of my own knowledge on the subject and did not research this at all so this may not be 100% correct lol)
Ok so like somewhere before 2004 some people in Japan were cooking up a program that could produce a singing voice by just shoving Japanese text and the note in which it's supposed to be sung into it. Very cool idea. It completely flopped.
Then, some genius had the following bright idea: "Ok so hear me out what if we sell the voices with accompanying cute anime girls as the mascots" which was, of course, the best idea anyone has ever had.
Yada yada, all kinds of history, Meiko & Kaito, Hatsune Miku, other characters are born, NND, amazing yes woohoo we have a vocal synthesizer yayY!!.
Shit became incredibly popular in Japan and then also spread to like Europe and the US and now we can buy long blue hair girl figurines and plushies and go to concerts with hologramsbig LED screens woo yay.
Oh yeah right there's also some other projects which aren't made by the company behind vocaloid. There's UTAU, which is beautiful because it's basically open source I'm pretty sure (not entirely sure). I'm a big fan of this because for some reason to use a voice like Miku you have to buy not only her voicebank (which is like €120 I believe), but also the fucking vocaloid program itself.
Long text about how it's dumb that vocaloid isn't open source, don't read it
Ok so listen, I completely understand locking the voicebanks behind paywalls, that's like a logical thing to do. The voice provider needs to spend a large amount of time and effort for it, and there is probably a lot of pre-processing involved. Furthermore, locking a voicebank behind a paywall doesn't really prevent other people from benefiting from the (very cool) program you've made. It's like selling an instrument. But why would you lock the program itself behind one too????? Just give the program away for free as free software and then sell the voices??? That works!!! That way everyone and their grandma can make voicebanks, allowing for more creativity in general!!! Oh well I guess they want to make more money than they already would have by selling only the voices (the voices are very expensive).
And then there's Synthesizer V, which uses modern artificial intelligence and shit to make the voices sound more real which is like really cool and shit (also not open though 😔). There's probably others that I forgot or don't know about too.
Basically, its a computer program that can produce relatively good sounding voices. A voice synthesizer. This enables creators who can't sing and don't have access to a singer to still create music with vocals, which is beautiful in my opinion.
Anyway here's some songs that you should absolutely listen to if you've never (consciously) listened to vocaloid before:
The songs
Matoryoshka is a classic. One of the most famous vocaloid songs. It also really fucking slaps, go listen to it:
Kenshi Yonezu/Hachi: Matoryoshka
Matoryoshka uses the voices of Miku and the slightly less well-known Gumi. Gumi is obviously the superior character here.
Idk how they do it but Azari is capable of making some of the best songs on the planet:
Azari: Casino
Slightly more experimental/abstract/whatever you want to call it song by Azari which I really like:
Azari: Be My Guest
These use the VFlower and Kaai Yuki voices which are my favourites.
Cool jazzy/swingy (I don't know how genres work) song:
Natsuyama Yotsugi: Messed Up!
My favourite song (of which the video is also amazing) (you don't understand the amount of joy this song fills me with):
Inabakumori: Rainy Boots
(Inabakumori is a fucking mastermind)
Really cool English SynthV song by Kian (bro you don't even know how much I love this song it is so incredibly amazing oh my god):
Kian: DIM-WITTED POLKA
Kian is very underrated btw, go subscribe to him
Another absolute classic:
Kikuo: Aishite Aishite Aishite
Ok I'm ready give me the full list