Space Constraints
As I said I would, I have put up a few Skewed updates this week. With a Dungeons and Dragons campaign taking up a majoriy of this week, completely throwing my sleep schedule back off again, I haven't been able to do as much work as I have wanted for the week. I just got the main function of my new scripting system for Spiral Island working properly, and I was going to spend some time with a profiler to make sure it isn't a heavy performance drain before continuing on, but I've been having some difficulty getting profiling tools to work properly.
One of the most amusing things about this apartment is we're all longtime friends, and at any moment something hilarious could happen out of nowhere. There's been so many random things that would have been nice to capture on video to upload to Youtube that just happened spontaneously. Conversation, too, spontaneous humor at any moment, so while playing D&D yesterday I decided to turn on GoldWave and record everything.
Now the problem with that is sessions of course go for a long time. I set it to record 5 hours worth, but since we just had one boss to fight left over from the previous session it was only 3 hours and 40 minutes of recording. The problem with that, though, is later on, trying to save the file. On average, saving MP3's at the usual rate of 128kbps will give you about 1 MB for every minute. Obviously, that would end up being a very large file at length, so that wouldn't work. Knowing some things about human voice range and encoding formats, I ended up going for 32kbps encoding rate at 32000 hertz sampling. I also used WMA format, which is better at lower encoding rates then standard MP3 is (a separate method known as MP3pro was written for lower encoding rates). I would have gone for 22000 sampling, honestly, but GoldWave didn't offer a high enough encoding rate at 22khz for my liking.
In the end, the nearly 4 hour file ended up at a filesize of only 50 MB. It sounds a little tinny due to the highpass of the sampling rate, but it's still easy to comprehend. Also, as a side note, the array microphone on the XPS 1530 is a lot more sensitive than I was expecting of it, I was very impressed.
Date posted: 09 July, 2009Tags: anecdote computer personal skewed software spiral_island
Holiday Relaxing
Trying to get work done this last week has been rather diffucult. To try and remedy that, I've been spending the holiday weekend unwinding, and attempting to get back off my graveyard sleep schedule again, which I somehow ended up back on. I've watched Schindler's List and a couple other movies, and sat down and just fell into a writing groove for Skewed, writing a bunch of ahead parts. I'm going to perhaps spend the rest of the day continuing writing ahead, until I get to the end of this chapter, and also watch New Rose Hotel when I get some time.
Date posted: 05 July, 2009Tags: movies personal skewed writing
People are Deaf
While I didn't know that it was a Yamaha product until today, I've known about Vocaloid for a long time. It wasn't anything made with it that first brought it to my attention, though, it was suddenly seeing the name "Miku" everywhere coming out of Japan. I had thought it was a fairly safe name when I started Skewed back in 2004. It wasn't a real Japanese name, and the sound of it had a general male alignment. But now, thanks to Miku Hatsune, I can't ever use that name again for a male character.
But that's not why we are here today, no. We're going to talk more about the software itself. I've spoken a fair amount in the past about voice recognition, and hand in hand with that is always voice synthesis. Now, voice synthesis itself is fairly diffucult, due to the complexity of vocal speech, but doubly hard from that is synthesis of the voice with tone put to it, synthesis of singing. That is, of course, what the Vocaloid software is about.
Now for a long time I've had my own ideas about methods of creating speech synthesis software, and its one of the primary reasons I started studying linguistics so I could understand some more of what goes into it, but I had been holding off on starting work on the software because of computer processing power. So when I first heard about the Vocaloid I was rather interested to hear what had been come up with so far. However, the original samples I'd heard all sounded so horribly mechanized I had no desire to hear any more and no hope for it for another good while.
Images of a PSP game based on Vocaloid caught my eye on an imageboard a few days ago, or more specifically, a Miku Hatsune PSP game by the name of "Project Diva". I'd heard talk about it for some time but I thought it was all in jest, because I didn't think that a product based on chiefly fanmade work would really come into existance on a console like that. Much to my surprise I was wrong, and we can thank SEGA for taking the risk. As I was reading about this game, though, I still had to wonder what they would do as far as the songs for it, and, expecting that they would want to use some good stuff for a commercial product, I started to listen to some of the track list.
Much to my delight, it actually can be used for some decent sounding singing. Just to share a couple of my favorites of what I heard, I'll give you the links for "Last Night, Good Night" and the unexpecedly swing "Miracle Painting". Granted they're a lot smoother than some of the things I've heard staged in the Vocaloid2 software, bu it still has a distinct synthesized sound to it. Plus, in my own personal taste, the general high squeaky voice she has I don't really like much anyway. But it did convince me that the software was fairly capable.
So after reading some, I decided to look into the software some more, which is where I finally discovered it was by Yamaha. Yamaha does good synthesis, and the XG softsynth of the 90s was one of my favorite MIDI synthesizers, second only to the Brookstree/Conexant WaveStream software which I put back together my Pentium to be able to use again. And as I read, apparently the regular Vocaloids ended up being created due to a general artist reluctance to contribute their voices to create Vocaloid data. There was a new libray made recently that the Japanese singer Gackt contributed to, which also used a new build of the Vocaloid software with a new feature, that actually sounds pretty decent, and also sounds really close to how Gackt sounds normally.
So based on that, and my clear recognition of Gackt, I began wondering if maybe the person that the Miku is based off of just has that normally high squeaky voice. Her name is Saki Fujita, a fairly recent voice actress which I've only actually seen one of the shows she was in. But I couldn't actually think of the voice from that character, so I looked up a random song by her, and found "Crystal Quartz". I can hear where Miku comes out of that, but there's so much difference between the actual voice and the synthesized Miku Hatsune. There's a great deal of voiced changes in the singing that it simply doesn't get replicated, changes in the throat as well as the mouth that change the sound of vowels and consonants subtly while still keeping the same vowels and consonants. There's still things that can be improved in Vocaloid.
But what I really found interesting was the conversation I had after that. I know someone who had said he was going to try playing with the Vocaloid software before, and while he may or may not have actually done it I knew he had known about it, and I have also had some other audiophile-categoried conversations with him in the past. So while talking to him about it, an increasinlgly confusion brought to my attention a surprising fact: he couldn't tell the difference between Saki and Miku's singing. I can tell the difference very clearly, but to him they sounded the same. And reading the comments on the Crystal Quartz video, a lot of people seemed to prefer the way the voice sounds in the synthesized singing of Miku over the genuine article.
So I've come to a conclusion, that suddenly makes everything regarding Vocalod clear. People are deaf.
Date posted: 29 June, 2009Tags: japanese linguistic music pronunciation skewed software video_games
The Bard sRc
To bring everything to head, we'll recap the story so far. Ever since I started on the internet, all the way back in '97, I was known by the alias "The Anaconda". But, recently, in an act that's practically suicide in the realm of the internet, I no longer use that name. I have completely changed my identity, in the process of about a year and a half's worth of time, with a new identity, that of "sRc". I've talked about reasons why, but there's one thing I still haven't covered. The bard.
At this point I've now posted four poems under the "Something Different" header. The actual title of this series is "Refractions of a Shattered Soul", and it began sometime in 2004 with a poem my character quoted in the backstory I wrote for Ties to Infinity. Since I haven't gotten to uploading that onto here yet I'll not talk about it further right now, but it was based on a dream I had at the time. The second entry, the Crossroads of the Four Winds, I wrote in a notebook sometime before May of 2006. That's where I first really created the bard persona.
The bard is a profession from the Gaelic and British areas in the Middle ages. Most people nowadays know it by the D&D job named after it (or the Final Fantasy job based from that for those video game players that didn't play D&D). But in essence the bard's role is as a singer, a poet, a narrator and storyteller. A task, while certainly known by different tiles in the modern day, essential to the world today. The bards are our musicians. The bards are our book writers. The bards author our films, and the bards give us our video games. And thus, I am a bard.
The idea of "The Bard sRc" came, actually, from my development of the story of Phobia. I was playing with the idea of a double of myself in that world sitting in on the storyline as a side character, taking down notes of what was happening to develop into a video game later. I didn't really call him the Bard until I paired him with another character, though, as a opposing personality to another sideline character, with that character referring to him not by name, and not by alias, but simply "The Bard" whenever someone asked her about him.
But putting aside where I first really used the term, the concept of "The Bard sRc" encompasses so much more. Refractions of a Shattered Soul, a opposing story I had started on the AnacondaSoftware site called "Reflections of a Tortured Soul", the many fragments of stories I've started but never finished, all the way back to my high school and the creation of the concept of James Millen. I am an author, I am a musician. I am the storyteller, and my job is to do just that. And it is my wish, and my task, that you not know me directly, but instead know me and remember me for my work. My name is not important, what's important is what you gain from my stories. I am the Author, I am the Bard.
Gather 'round, let me tell you a story.
Date posted: 26 June, 2009Tags: j_millen movies music names new_alexandria novels personal regularspelling television video_games writing
RTFM?
So I was putting back together an old Pentium 1 computer, which I have mentioned before as giving me nothing but problems when it was my main computer, but I need to run some old sound hardware I plan on using. As I turned it on to make sure it hadn't been damaged and become inoperational in the years of disuse, I was presented with a beep code from the BIOS. I had to go look it up, and in the process stumbled upon the original manual for the machine on the HP website.
As I read through it, I found certain supported operating configurations, which, as it turned out, I was not running it in. Specifically, the RAM requirements, I was running in an unsupported configuration. As it was RAM - which the original had gone misssing - that was the whole cause for the beep code, I needed to track down some different RAM for the machine (thanks Duaine!). I put in RAM in a supported configuration, then began thinking I may have to make an entry on how the years I was running this machine and complaining about it were purely my fault, since it was trying to run with RAM it could not support.
However, a few minutes trying to run Rise of the Triad to test later, all that worry was gone as the problem resurfaced to assure me there was an actual issue with the machine.
Date posted: 23 June, 2009Tags: computer