Vocaloid Popularity:
An Investigation
ABOUT
Woah, hi there!
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I'm Kathy, the creator of this website. You found out the secret page! Congratulations! Shoot me an email at thanhhien.pham@peninsulagrammar.vic.edu.au and boast about your achievement with the keyword "Mirai".
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Other than that, welcome to my log of backstory about Vocaloids, website development and a ton of other random contents.
CREDITS & THANKS!
Great thanks to Mr. Xin, my Informatics teacher who assisted me greatly and revealed immense interest in Vocaloid. Maybe I'm not getting him to join the fandom, but honestly, that was cool.
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Amazing thanks to Fritz, even though you probably can't understand this. The day I found your site and all the graphs of NicoNico data you made, I knew I won't fail this project.
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Many thanks to all the artists whose art are featured somewhere on this site.
You made the soul of the site.
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Special thanks to iXima whose Hatsune Miku V4X design inspired the color scheme (extracted by Serza5) and thumbnail choice of the site. Look at that beautiful color!
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More thanks to Google, namely Google Fonts for the Roboto font family. Saves my life every time I need a good looking, easy to read sans serif font; Google Trends, for providing me a bunch of amazing data; Google Forms, for allowing to make the survey and Google Google, for helping me learn everything I needed to know for this project.
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And a humongous thank you to every participant of my survey. I expected, like, 20 people to do it. I didn't expect 250. And I can promise you, the opinion on Vocaloid declining or not stays divided at around 50/50 THE ENTIRE TIME the results were coming in. Mind-blowing.
PROJECT BACKSTORY
The whole project started because of a school project.
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I was supposed to find a topic I'm extremely interested in, gather data about it and use data analysis tools and techniques to find the answer to a hypothesis. I spent two weeks asking myself: "Can I do something about Vocaloid?" and in the end, I said "yes" to myself because I figured there's no way in hell I'm working on anything other than Vocaloid for four months straight and with a ton of effort (I intend to get a perfect score for Informatics this year.)
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When I was looking for a particular aspect to do research on, I remembered an old blog post by Coleena Wu translating the opinion of Kouhey on the popularity decline of Vocaloid. I looked up more info about this, but all I get everywhere is a bunch of personal opinions and no hard data or analysis (in English) anywhere. On my end, I definitely believe everything's been going downhill and it has been very obvious in 2016: community translators (descentsubs, Sunny Subs, coleena wu) disappeared one after another, many legendary producers moved away from Vocaloid or disappeared, number of breakthrough song monthly became less and less. I hung on to utaite covers, hidden gems or 40mP's weekly piano livestream where he plays Vocaloid medleys live for an hour every Saturday. Nostalgia right there.
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I was never part of the contributing community, I was always on the receiving end. So I decided to put my two cents into this, and whatever the outcome of the research may be, I'll accept it.
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That said, I'm still sad that there's an actual decline for everybody besides Miku. I don't have anything against her, but there are many excellent Vocaloids out there, you know?
FUN FACTS
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The Vocaloid Mixtape was an unplanned part of this site. It's also a mixtape because Wix doesn't allow a playlist with a neat player like the design you can see right now.
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For some reason I kept gravitating towards the Hatsune Miku V4X box art for the design and art of this site. Probably because it looks really awesome.
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I've been in the Vocaloid fandom since 2011. It's not wrong to say Vocaloid grew up with me, was part of my childhood. After 2 boyfriends, 2 countries, a bunch of schools, a pile of achievements and even more friends, Vocaloid is still there through every ups and downs with me. Can't help but hold onto it, y'know.
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When I first got to Australia and had absolutely 0 friends, I found out the guy who sits next to me every morning was one of the best Project Diva Future Tone players in the world and the best in Australia. We talked about Miku. We're friends till now. WHO SAID OTAKUS CAN'T MAKE FRIENDS???
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I once knew the name and avatar of every. single. Vocaloid available. I lost count after the 72nd Vocaloid. Yes there are more than 90 Vocaloids out there at the point of this writing.
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My favorite voicebank is IA and favorite avatar design is Yuzuki Yukari.
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I honestly have a strong emotional attachment to Miku probably because she's seen as the representative of Vocaloid. And because of ODDS&ENDS. Darn those onion cutting ninjas.
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Talking about songs where Miku is conscious about herself, gotta check out ODDS&ENDS by ryo (supercell), Initial Song by 40mP, Sand Planet by Hachi and The Disappearance of Hatsune Miku by cosMo. There are probably more. Tell me if you know any!
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This page exists because I'm trying to procrastinate on writing the report for the website design process and wanted to capture a moment of this excitement.