Studio Nekoyanagi's Kagamiusagi / かがみうさぎ - Found!
Thank goodness for the WayBack Machine. Without it, this UTAU would be lost forever! The design feels insanely familiar, but I could never remember hearing the name Kagamiusagi.
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| Official Art Packaged with Bank |
There is no information on what the voice is or how it was created. The only lead is that it was made by Studio Nekoyanagi. Studio Nekoyanagi is a company that mostly exists to create media for people as far as I can tell. However, when they had their foray into UTAU, they used Kagamiusagi as the singer on albums they sold online.
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| The album preview is really, really cute. |
The voice honestly sounds computer generated. However, I'm stumped on how they would make it. The things that make me think it's probably computer generated is how awkward the vowels sound. Looking really closely at the pitch line and waveform doesn't exactly confirm it. There is some obvious crossfade in some samples, but that could be a human who recorded short samples, then looped the vowels.
Regardless of all of that, this UTAU can sound amazing in the right hands. (Unless there's a new bank I have no idea about, of course.)
Let's talk about ん
Sometimes when people seemingly have no idea what they are doing, they end up doing something so smart, a learned person would wish they thought of it first. There are two versions of every required kana. The first is normal with a (very likely) looped vowel. That first set of samples is around four seconds long on average. The second set's samples are much shorter. Windows File Explorer reports their length as zero seconds, and half of that is taken up by an ん.
UTAU with VC support is on the horizon, but this bank was recorded in June of 2009. I have no idea what they were thinking at that point. However, what they were thinking doesn't matter. What does matter is that by putting ん into the suffix broker will result in a bank with shorter, clearer samples if you cover the "n" sound with the blue part at the end in the OTOs.
For example, here is Kagamiusagi singing a UST with only the regular CV files:
Because the samples are so long, it has an effect I used to call "cheese cloth". For some reason, when you give UTAU samples that are of a certain length, it starts to sound weirdly hollow like it has been pulled through a cheese cloth. . . or was it that the voice had holes like it was cheese cloth? I forget the reason for the mental image, but it still stuck! Because of the weird looping of the vowels, it also adds a tad bit of vibrato where there isn't any in the UST. Contrast that with a sample rendered with the samples ending in ん (with the ん covered by the blank, of course). Long notes remained the "normal" samples.
Big difference, huh! Technically, you can do this with almost any bank by simply adding aliases and pulling the blue blank really close to the consonant . . . but I was really excited when I figured out this little feature!
About OTOs . . .
This bank comes with a blank OTO. Ouch. A kind soul on NicoVideo released an OTO file for Kagamiusagi. However, it doesn't take advantage of the cool trick with the ん samples and it made me sigh when I saw it. However, it is better than a blank OTO!
How can I download KagamiUsagi?!
First off, you need to use the WayBack Machine. This UTAU voicebank is actually stored on the WayBack Machine! If that's not cool, I don't know what is!
To use the WayBack Machine, go to this address and paste the address you want to go to next to the pretty text art that says "WayBackMachine". There are two addresses that will work.
- http://studionekoyanagi.jp/kagami/
- http://studionekoyanagi.jp/ダウンロード
Once you pick a date, you will be taken to the page you pasted in. All you need to do is click the the big link. Once you do that you should have your very own copy of KagamiUsagi! I hope that someone finds this useful and plays around with this cute little rabbit ☺️
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