Niconico Douga user creates an Utada Hikaru Vocaloid

 

Utada Hikaru announced that she would be going on an indefinite hiatus beginning this year, but that doesn’t mean you can’t hear new music from her!

A user on the popular Japanese video website Niconico Douga, often considered the Japanese equivalent to YouTube, posted a video that attempts to imitate the J-Pop legend herself. The song uses the voice synthesizer “Jinriki Vocaloid,” which differs from other Vocaloids in that the voice bank must be created by the user. Voice samples are extracted from songs or recording in .WAV format and then placed into the program for use just like the other Vocaloids.
The Jinriki Vocaloid technology itself is used by collecting the voice of a real person, resolving the voice into a phoneme, changing the pitch of each phoneme, and putting the phoneme together into a song.  With the technology, all the work is done manually, so there are few people who can use it effectively, thus adding to the amazement of fans that listened.
The video has shocked Japanese netizens because of the program’s stunning likeness to Utada Hikaru, who even commented about it on her official Twitter. “They did such a good job on this~! I applaud whoever made this!“, she tweeted in response to a fan who showed her the original Niconico video.
Fans have been marveling over the creation as well, leaving comments such as, “Incredible!,” “This is amazing, I keep listening to it,” and “Ahhhh I’m smiling so much right now thanks to this.”