VOCALOID

(and other vocal synths)

I've been a VOCALOID fan since 2009!

How I Got Started

When I first actually heard a Vocaloid song, I didn't know what it was and did not seek it out. In late 2008 or very early 2009, I liked watching Kirby and Super Smash Bros. MADs (parody videos) reuploaded from Nico Nico Douga to YouTube. My computer at the time could not read Japanese text and rendered it as mojibake, so I was mostly blindly clicking from video to video, haha.

I found a Kirby MAD that appeared to be based on Kirby & the Amazing Mirror, as it featured four different colored Kirbies. It was a fairy tale-esque music video with strangely robotic Japanese vocals. (This turned out to be "Alice Human Sacrifice" or "Hitobashira Alice" by YugamiP. The video even listed "Kirby played Human Sacrifice Alice" in English in the title! I guess I wasn't curious enough to find out more.

The second time I heard a Vocaloid song, I still didn't learn what it was. It was a Smash Bros. Brawl music video for "Melt" by ryo. (I'm actually thinking about this more for the first time in years, and I think I also watched this Brawl Ievan Polkka parody that used a cover with Kagamine Rin and Len. Who's to say which one I saw first?!) I thought of them as just some cute silly videos and moved on.

I learned about Vocaloid ~~FOR REAL THIS TIME~~ when I was reading a Kirby fanfiction titled The Ugly Yet Beautiful on FanFiction.net, and the author had referenced "Daughter of Evil" and "Fear Garden" during their haunted house/summer festival chapter. In the author notes, they said those were song titles from a group called Vocaloid. I finally dived in and it was honestly all a blur lol.