Trivia / Vocaloid

For trivia related to Hatsune Miku, go here.

• Acting for Two:
  • A 1st Place concert featured a special where IA performed the Angel Beats! theme song "My Soul, Your Beats!" with its original singer, Lia. Lia is IA's voice provider, so techically, Lia is duet-ing with herself. Some other voice providers have also sang alongside their Vocaloids, such as GACKT with Gackpo and Chihiro Ishiguro with Yukari.
  • Rin and Len are voiced by the same woman, Asami Shimoda. Rion and Nemu also have the same voice provider, Yumemi Nemu.
• Ascended Fanon:
  • Though technically not fanon due to being created by a company to be the Mac response to Vocaloid, Macne Nana is the very first voicebank that can be used in UTAU to get an official Vocaloid voicebank.
  • Oliver's bird has no official name, but a number of fans decided to call him James, and the name stuck — to the extent that even the VocaTone staff have begun using it, but they stated that the name is still not canon.
  • A popular subgenre of Vocaloid videos among fans are "Talkloids", where the samples are manipulated to make the synthesisers sound like they're talking instead of singing. After AH Software released simultaneous Voiceroid and Vocaloid versions of some of their banks, other studios would join in by either including a speech add-on for their characters or making the talking process easier in the software from the start.
  • Regarding KAITO as an older brother figure and referring to him as "KAITO-oniisan" has been a popular trend since the old days of Vocaloid. Word of God took notice and began referring to KAITO this way as well. In fact, he's the only virtual singer referred to in this way, as normal honorifics are used for the other Crypton virtual singers instead.
  • Sakine MEIKO makes an appearance in the Project DIVA series alongside a few other fanmade characters based on preexisting Cryptons such as Akita Neru and Yowane Haku.
• Cash-Cow Franchise: A huge hit in Japan and overseas, to the extent that there are musicals and even concerts of them! The Crypton Vocaloids are the biggest examples of this trope, as they have tons of merch, yearly concerts, multiple games dedicated to their songs and even mobile games, such as Project Sekai: Colorful Stage! Featuring Hatsune Miku.
• Casting Gag: GUMI's voice is provided by Megumi Nakajima, who previously voiced the Idol Singer Ranka Lee in Macross Frontier. Her design and outfit is even similar to Ranka's.
  • Similarly, Rin and Len are not the only pair of twins Asami Shimoda has voiced.
• Children Voicing Children: Kaai Yuki and Oliver were both voiced by actual young children, albeit uncredited for the sake of preserving their privacy. It was noted by AH-Software during a promotional stream that there was difficulty in upgrading Yuki to VOCALOID4 because her voice provider's voice had changed somewhat with age.
• Colbert Bump:
  • In a way for producers. While they are the ones creating the work, using Vocaloids, but especially Hatsune Miku, has helped a number of producers get their start in the music world after their Vocaloid works achieved success. Some examples include Ayase, Kenshi Yonezu, and Honeyworks.
  • While fairly well-received upon release, the heavy usage of IA in the concept series Kagerou Project helped boost her popularity a ton once the series began to gain traction.
• Creative Differences: This is reportedly why Crypton Future Media would split from Vocaloid in 2019 to form their own vocal synthesizer program in the form of Piapro Studio. Basically, Yamaha wanted to embrace more realistic and human-sounding vocals for Vocaloid, while Crypton wanted to retain the more distinctly mechanical and robotic voices of their characters that made them stand out to begin with.
• Crossdressing Voices:
  • Len, Ryuto, and Iroha have vocal providers of the opposite gender.
  • While not quite "voice actors" in the traditional sense, female vocaloids are commonly used to play male roles in songs featuring male characters. As well, Len has been used to play female roles.
• The Danza:
  • Both of Gumi's names come from Megumi Nakajima. ^note GUMI from her nickname as a child, and Megpoid from Megumi.
  • Kamui Gakupo is named after GACKT.
  • Meiko's voice provider is named Meiko Haigo.
  • Miriam's voice provider is Miriam Stockley.
  • SF-A2 miki's voice provider is named Miki Furukawa.
  • Utatane Piko's voice provider is NND singer Piko.
  • YOHIOloid got his name from the singer Yohio.
  • Chika's name comes from her voice provider, Chiaki Ito.
  • Sachiko's voice provider is enka singer Sachiko Kobayashi.
  • Fukase's voice provider is SEKAI NO OWARI vocalist Satoshi Fukase.
  • Kano Akira is named after OH-SE's "Kano Akira" persona in ARSMAGNA.
  • Hiyama Kiyoteru is voiced by Kiyoshi Hiyama.
  • Yumemi Nemu is named after DEMPAGUMI Inc. vocalist Nemu Yumemi.
  • Played with in a non-product example: the Hatsune Miku that appears in Shinkansen Henkei Robo Shinkalion is definitely based (albeit with some subtle tweaks to the name) on her namesake, but she's not voiced by Miku herself; voice provider Saki Fujita plays the role to give her a more natural sound.
• Defictionalization:
  • Gakupo was based of voice samples from GACKT. Then Nico Nico held a vocaloid contest hosted by Gackt where they asked him to sing the winning songs "Episode.0" and "Paranoid Doll." The result was Gackt not only created and released a remix of the song Episode.0, but also created a video that was identical to the original PV but with the pictures of Gakupo replaced with pictures of Gackt dressed as Gakupo. Here is the original PV of Episode 0.
  • Vocaloids themselves for Sharon Apple. Synthetic pop-star, human vocal element, live holographic concerts...
• Died During Production: Powapowa-P had a series of songs he made from 2013 until his passing in 2015. All the songs had a certain theme; conflict, loneliness, change, tomorrow, and life - the final song was supposed to be themed around "now", which was unfortunately never finished. Before his death, he did release some other songs on his albums "Ikiru" and "Poncotsu Odyssey", and he released a song shortly before he passed called "Please Give Me a Red Pen". In addition, he has a posthumously-released song called "Healthy End". However, he never said if Please Give Me a Red Pen and if any of his album-exclusive songs are the "now" song, and it has never been confirmed if Healthy End is also the "now" song.
• Fan Community Nickname: Vocaloid fans are sometimes dubbed "Voca-fans".
• Flip-Flop of God: Crypton first described Kagamine Rin and Len as mirror images, then took that back and called them twins. Later, they ended up taking both statements back and ended up leaving it up to anyone's interpretation and have since endorsed varying interpretations of them, such as including songs that depict them as siblings or romantic couples in official works. Project SEKAI even has their characters clarify that their relationship with each other is up to interpretation.
• Follow the Leader:
  • Vocaloid has inspired the creation of quite a few other vocal synths - some more notable examples include UTAU, Synth V and CeVIO.
  • Other vocal synths, and even other Vocaloids, were inspired by the success of Hatsune Miku. Many took cues from her design, some notable examples being Macne Nana, Acme Iku, Kasane Teto, Camui Gackpo, and Dong Fang Zhi Zi, just to name a few. As such, designs for several vocal synths have been criticized for following "Miku Formula" due to using similar tropes in their designs that Miku's design has, like Zettai Ryouiki, pleated skirts, a futuristic aesthetic, and so on, despite many of these not even originating from Miku herself. Vocaloid Wiki has an interesting article on this here.
  • In terms of overall character design, many Vocaloids started getting personified designs on their box art after the success of Crypton's Character Vocals, since its newfound audience would later expect other banks to be "characters" the same way.
  • There have been a few attempts at creating twin vocals to mirror the success of Kagamine Rin and Len. Anon and Kanon and MEIKA Hime and Mikoto are some examples.
  • Another possible example exists in VOCALOID6. While it was hinted back in 2019 that YAMAHA was making a move to create more human-sounding vocals from their voicebanks, hence that being one of the reasons for Crypton Future Media's abrupt departure, YAMAHA dropped VOCALOID6 in late 2022, a program which utilizes AI technology to create more natural vocals. This came in the wake of vocal synthesizers like Synth V and CEVIO AI, both of which already utilized this technology, though it's unknown if YAMAHA began the creation of VOCALOID AI in order to compete with these programs.
• Invisible Advertising: YAMAHA dropped VOCALOID6 on October 13, 2022 with no advertising leading up to it whatsoever, making the sudden release come as a surprise to pretty much everyone that witnessed it.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Most voicebanks released for VOCALOID and VOCALOID2 have become a lot harder to track down due to YAMAHA no longer handing out serial codes for them. However, any Vocaloid who has a voicebank released from VOCALOID3 onward are still available for download on YAMAHA's website. However, two of them have their own unique situations:
  • Utatane Piko, who was only released for VOCALOID2, was completely out of stock on July 2020 according to Sony's website, not long after distribution of the serial codes for VOCALOID2 voice banks have been discontinued. Because any chance of a restock is dead in the water, good luck trying to get an existing copy of his voicebank yourself, as he's extremely rare now.
  • SeeU's case has been very rocky for years since her release, and SBS A&T has no plans to remake or update her due to multiple difficulties, including a decision to give her a new voice provider despite Kim Dahee's arrest. The sales of her voicebank in Japan have also been long discontinued. As of 2023, her voicebank only had at least 400 serial codes remaining. Once all of these have been sold and used up, she's done for.
• Licensed Game:
  • The Project DIVA series from SEGA casts the Crypton Vocaloids, some of the most popular Vocaloids( Miku, Rin, Len, Luka, MEIKO, and KAITO)^note Guest starring Teto, Haku, Neru, Mikudayo, and Tako Luka into a popular Rhythm Game franchise. Its sister franchise Project mirai also includes GUMI, and other, non-Crypton Vocaloids also have their own games, such as Megpoid the Music# for GUMI's standalone title, as well as IA/VT COLORFUL for IA.
  • Sega released what can be considered the first proper Vocaloid mobile Rhythm Game in the form of Project SEKAI Colorful Stage! ft. Hatsune Miku. Similar to Project DIVA, it only features the Crypton Vocaloids ^note Now referred to as Virtual Singers, though it differs in that an Original Generation of characters is also introduced to act and sing alongside them. As well, unlike in Project Diva, the game also includes famous songs sung by non-Crypton Vocaloids (such as Gumi, Flower, and IA), though some of these are given Virtual Singer covers in the form of SEKAI versions, which are sung alongside the original characters, or Another Vocals ^note Project Sekai's equivalent of a Vocal Switch.
• No Export for You:
  • Many of the non-English Vocaloids were rather difficult to get if you don't live in Japan, and shipping can get to ridiculous prices. Yamaha attempted to avert this with some Vocaloid3 banks such as VY1V3, Mew, Aoki Lapis, Tone Rion, and the V3 Gumi banks available as downloads; Voctro-Labs ships Bruno and Clara internationally; and SBS put up SeeU on eBay, albeit at a considerably higher price; but some, like Yukari Yuzuki, are still rather difficult to get overseas.
  • Do you want to buy an album by your favorite composer, or a compilation album? Unless it's registered on KarenT, you will probably never be able to get it, because they're usually sold at Comiket or VocaMas — and even if they're sold online too, they're usually on Japanese-only sites.
  • Even if you can read Japanese or use a translator, good luck seeing any of the Theatrical Plays based on the more famous songs. Those few that do have DVD releases never seem to have subtitles, English or otherwise.
  • The first three Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA entries for the PlayStation Portable (DIVA, 2nd and Extend) have never been released outside of Japan. Fortunately, the franchise has since averted this beginning with F, with it and all subsequent entries getting released globally.
    • Likewise, the first two entries of Project DIVA's spin off series on the Nintendo 3DS, Project mirai and Project mirai 2, did not leave Japanese shores. Averted with mirai DX, which would receive a global release in 2015.
  • For a time, it was impossible to buy the Vocaloid 4 engine, VY1V4 and/or Cyber Diva from the official Vocaloid online store unless you were from Japan, despite the fact that the latter is geared towards the American market.
  • "Senbonzakura" is a mainstay of arcade Rhythm Games and the Project DIVA series...unless you're in South Korea. The song is excluded from Korea-specific builds of those games for cultural reasons involving its lyrics.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content: YOHIOLOID, Maika, Bruno, Clara, and Fukase all had their character designs chosen from fan designs or contests. VY1 and VY2 also had a design contest, but the designs that won aren't their official appearances.
• One-Hit Wonder: Mixed with Short-Lived, Big Impact. While there has been a number of VOCALOID producers that had only one or two major hits, Ika is a very notable example; he had only made three Vocaloid songs before he left Nico Nico Douga in late 2007 due to being plagued by copyright concerns. However, his first song, "Miku Miku ni Shite Ageru♪", is not only his most popular work,^note Combining the official upload views of both the original song and 2012 remake but was also the first VOCALOID song to hit 1 million views, one of the earliest songs to establish her as a character, and being responsible for skyrocketing Miku's, and, to a greater extent, VOCALOID's popularity as a whole. Ika himself hasn't been active in the VOCALOID community since 2013, but he retained an active presence on both Youtube and Twitter(X).
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • The role of Lapis' seiyuu went to the singer who submitted the best audition, Nako Eguchi.
  • This occurred similarly in Merli's case, with Misaki Kamata being awarded as the provider.
  • Miwasiba's V4 design for Flower started off as Rule 63 fanart.
  • Porter Robinson went from being a Vocaloid fan and a notable AVANNA user to voicing his own VOCALOID, Po-uta.
• Recursive Adaptation: Gakupo was based of Gackt who then made a remix of a Gakupo song and PV.
• Referenced by...: BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm has a Vocaloid concert as part of its plot in Chapter 4, and one scene involves the main heroine disguising herself as Miku to get backstage. Rin and the real Miku both make direct appearances at the concert, while several other Vocaloids, (Luka, Gumi, and Lily), are mentioned by name.
• Sleeper Hit: Vocaloid was only mildly successful until Hatsune Miku was released in 2007. Her software was so well-received that it boosted the popularity of the program itself and the voicebanks, particularly KAITO and MEIKO, that came before her.
• Trope Codifier: The system has been the face of vocal synthesizers since the late 2000s into the 2010s, to the point where it's become a generic term for them in Japanese lingo.
• Vaporware:
  • We haven't heard much of CV04 and its existence since its confirmation in 2009, and details get more and more scant as time passes by; the latest information concerning his status dates to 2012. Word of God says that he's still in production. However, he might not be in the Character Vocal series anymore since he's now listed as "Male Vocal" rather than "CV04."
  • Crypton also laid out plans in 2009 for a possible VOCALOID-related project known as "Project if...", which was proposed to have an elementary school theme to contrast the high-school theme of the Character Vocal Series. The project was intended to have a choir-style set of voices made up of both professional singers and child singers, and in 2010 released a small selection of demos of a young girl's voice and a young boy's voice. Crypton claimed to intend to finish the project after completing work on the V3 versions of the CV characters and MEIKO and KAITO, but the project has received zero updates since 2016, leading most to assume it had been shelved.
  • Ring Suzune and Hibiki Lui were announced at the end of May 2011. They were the result of a contest titled "Everyone's Vocaloid project", which called for fans to create an original Vocaloid character for the then-upcoming Vocaloid3 engine. However, Development Hell struck and the project was picked up by VocaNext, whose website became inaccessible in late 2013. The duo are all but said to be abandoned at this point, with their only legacy being a singular demo using a prototype version of Ring.
  • A Vocaloid simply titled "H" was announced by 1st Place during a livestream in 2016. Outside of the initial announcement, nothing else was confirmed about that Vocaloid (at least, until 2020, when the project was suddenly announced as cancelled in another livestream), and it's been speculated H was put in suspension due to 1st Place's focus on CeVIO. This looks to be on its way to being subverted, however - in 2021, 1st Place introduced a new ARIA character with an "H" on her nametag, leading to fan speculation that this was the same character. The character was later unveiled to be "HIPPI", although as a Virtual Youtuber style singer and utaite rather than a vocal synth voicebank.
  • Zing, a character from the Zyon rhythm game by Aquatrax, was set to have a trilingual Vocaloid voicebank developed by EXIT TUNES and slated for release in 2018. However, absolutely nothing has come from this thus far; most of Zing's social media suspiciously went silent before the start of 2019, and there hasn't been even so much as a demo song or update on voicebank development since her announcement in 2017.
  • Zhanyin Lorra was a potential character that would have been part of the now-Vsinger group of characters by Shanghai HENIAN, announced in July of 2014 in collaboration with Chinese company NetEase. Lorra was initially marketed as an otherworldly companion to Yuezheng Ling, with both her and Ling's initial voicebanks being developed at the same time in 2015 and being intended to release for VOCALOID3. However, Lorra's voicebank went into Development Hell as the year progressed and she was pulled out of the VOCANESE character lineup when it was retooled into Vsinger and Stardust was introduced. It was later revealed that NetEase had decided to abandon Lorra's voicebank due to difficulties and she was later repurposed into a character for an upcoming video game with all relation to the Vsinger characters removed.
  • Xingchen's sister Haiyi was originally unveiled and planned to have a VOCALOID voicebank and her first demo "Atlantis" used a prototype, but it was ultimately scrapped and Haiyi (as well as the subsequent MEDIUM5 characters) was moved to Synthesizer V.
• What Could Have Been:
  • In 2013, a bilingual Vocaloid named ALYS would have been the first French speaking Vocaloid in the database. She was crowd funded by a company called VoxWave, and she was set to be a part of the V3 engine. However, due to the technical limitations of the Vocaloid engine (such as not being able to speak as well as she could sing) and hoping to make the system she's packaged in free to use, she was brought over to the CeVIO Creative Studio instead. She was later released on March 10, 2016, this time for Alter/Ego.
  • RUBY would have been bilingual with English and Japanese capabilities, but due to the difficulty in recording the Japanese voicebank, it was later scrapped.
  • GUMI's VOCALOID3 voicebanks were going to be called Megpoid Extend in a similar vein to Crypton's "Append" voicebanks. This was scrapped to avoid the misconception that it was necessary to own the original VOCALOID2 GUMI bank for it to install properly (in contrast to Crypton's Appends, GUMI's individual V3 voicebanks could be installed/purchased separately from the original voicebank and each other), and they're simply referred to as V3 Megpoid. However, some fans still mistakenly referred to her V3 voicebanks as Extends even after the name was scrapped.
  • Hatsune Miku's original VOCALOID2 voicebank was originally conceived as being bilingual with Japanese and English. This idea was scrapped and saved for Megurine Luka instead. However, she eventually did get a couple of English voicebanks, but it was long after the VOCALOID2 era had ended.
  • Sweet Ann and Big Al were originally planned to be released on the original V1 engine rather than V2. It's unknown why their V1 releases were cancelled, outside of Big Al's V1 voicebank going unfinished due to low quality and the process of remaking his voicebank being too expensive. Furthermore, Big Al was originally going to have a different voice provider (Michael King instead of Frank Sanderson), thus a much different sounding voicebank. However, the voicebank using Michael King's voice had quality issues, but King was too busy touring to re-record Al's samples.
  • Luo Tianyi was formerly named Yayin Gongyu, but this name was scrapped because it was based on a Japanese naming system rather than a Chinese one. The same applies to Zhiyu Moke (whose former name was MOKO), Mo Qingxian (Chou), Yuezheng Longya (Yayin), and Yuezheng Ling (Ling Caiyin).
  • SeeU was intended to be and was advertised as trilingual with full Japanese, Korean and English voicebanks, which would've made her the first trilingual Vocaloid, about 6 years before Miku would be. While she definitely has full Japanese and Korean banks, her English is only a very limited set of extra phonemes. She had a full English voicebank in the works, but it was put in suspended production in late 2013 because SBS was unsure what the fan reaction would be like, and they believed SeeU needed to be more popular. Her voice provider, Kim Dahee, was jailed almost a year after the cancellation, which probably put her English bank deeper in limbo.
  • MEIKO, KAITO, and Megurine Luka had Append voicebanks that were set to release during the V2 era. However, these voicebanks were not released for V2 - MEIKO and KAITO's new voicebanks would release for V3 instead, and Luka's would release for V4. Furthermore, the Kagamines were due for an update during V3 (as was Luka, for some time), but they also ended up releasing for V4. Curiously, MEIKO and KAITO's unused V2 vocals ended up being featured in Hatsune Miku and Future Stars: Project mirai.
  • Oliver was originally going to be named either "Cody", "Treble", or "Devin". It's unknown why these names were scrapped in favor of "Oliver".
  • Macne Nana was intended to have a Chinese VOCALOID voicebank alongside her Japanese and English V4 ones, but it only ever remained as a test voicebank and was never released.
  • Miku went through quite a few different design changes early in her development◊. One of her earliest designs depicts her with only one ponytail rather than her signature Girlish Pigtails along with a decidedly less 'futuristic' but more schoolgirl-esque outfit than later designs. Other early designs closer to the final product include a design that makes more references to her technological origins (like a QR code on her shoulder) and a more sophisticated design on her necktie, and one with a much different color scheme (a black shirt and blue skirt with black accents). The design with the singular ponytail and schoolgirl look would later become a semi-official derivative dubbed "Hatsune Miku if" in 2021.
  • VocaTone also planned a young masculine^note while the character and voicebank were initially referred to as male, it was later confirmed that they're agender and use they/them pronouns English vocal by the name of Ausgris and even released a demo featuring a beta version of their voicebank. Despite this, VocaTone maintained that Ausgris was largely unfinished and weren't sure if the voicebank would see a proper development or release, though they did state that there was progress being made on Ausgris, along with another 2 voicebanks, which was followed by a few years of no updates. Similarly to the ALYS example, Ausgris (now renamed Aurum) was announced to see release on a new engine, Maghni AI, along with another vocalist by the name of Audine. VocaTone also stated they originally planned to announce five vocals (two of which were named Era and Nyx) rather than just three, but the other two went unannounced due to VocaTone losing their license with Vocaloid.
  • Crypton originally had several Vocaloid plans that never came to fruition.
    • The first and obvious one is CV04, which was announced in 2009 and would've been the fourth member in the Character Vocal series following Hatsune Miku, Kagamine Rin/Len and Megurine Luka, with plans of him being the second male member in the series after Len. The project ultimately ended up falling through as Crypton would decide to shift their focus on their existing voicebanks instead.
    • Another Vocaloid project that never saw the light of day was "Project If…", which would've been a separate project from the CV series and would've been a choir style of voices that used young child singers as the basis (in contrast to the teenager/young adult singers of the CV series). Like with CV04, this ended up falling through due to Crypton's decision to focus on their existing voicebanks instead of making new ones.
  • Hatsune Miku was originally planned to appear in Coachella 2020. However, this fell through when Coachella 2020 got cancelled due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Luckily, she returned for the 2024 Coachella lineup.
  • SONiKA had a V4 voicebank in the works around 2016-17, getting far enough into development for an official design to be made. Sadly, she went unreleased due to Yamaha ending Vocaloid 4 support in preparation for the upcoming release of Vocaloid 5. A voicebank played by popular Vocaloid producer CircusP was also being worked on around the same time, but was scrapped for similar reasons.

Random Trivia

• Technically, Crypton only has one true male vocal bank, which is KAITO. Len counts as part of the Kagamine package, and since he was voiced by a woman, he is considered a female vocal at times. Conversely, AH has two— Kiyoteru and Iroha, since her voice provider was a boy.