Wiki Wednesday #5 - 泡沫アヤ / Utakata Aya

Who is Utakata Aya? Where can I download 泡沫アヤ? How many banks does Aya Utakata have?

Wiki Wednesday #5 - 泡沫アヤ / Utakata Aya

At certain times, I am bad at words. Please imagine me gesturing wildly at this audio as you listen to it.

When you search either Utakata Aya's romanized name or her official name on YouTube and then set it to sort by a specific criteria, you only get one video. It has nothing at all to do with UTAU.

And my honest question is how?! This UTAU, when used correctly, is super duper amazingly awesome!

Who is Aya Utakata?

Official Art Packaged with Bank

She's got one of those backstories that doesn't actually make that much sense. I stared at it, looked up all of the words, and I'm still confused. Something about her father being a god? Or does she fight a god that descended with her father? 

But look at that design!! Look at it! It is so insanely perfect and adorable! When you hear her voice provider, 花粉 / Kahun, make her sing, you imagine a girl like that doing the singing. 

Granted, it's really easy to make me love a design. It just has to look old fashioned and modest with a cohesive color story and I will be raving about how great it is.

Kahun has both a Twitter and a SoundCloud, but there has not been a new post on either for at least a year. I am very tempted to send an email telling her how much I love Aya, however.

How are the banks?

Well, there are ten banks and one folder with cute little speaking samples.

That is a lot of banks. However! Several of the CV banks come with suffixes, meaning they were intended for use in a multi-expression bank as opposed to being used by themselves.

Technically once the new version of UTAU rolls out, Alice, Navy, and Eve can be combined to make a giant multi-expression bank. The thing stopping that now is the issue of one prefix map per bank. The future version of UTAU will support different prefix maps for different folders!! That is really, really exciting. 

With the help of LibreOffice Calc and SetParam, I was able to combine five of the CV banks into one multi-expression bank. (Tip, prefix map only works on aliases when you have multiple folders. Filenames don't matter.)

In playing with the CV banks a bit, I've come to some conclusions.

• Languid's suffix is 猫. The combination of a soft and sweet voice type and cats should make me super happy, but there's just really weird issues. The fact that I love so much about this bank and it has enough wonky samples for me to take notice is a bummer.
• Lonely's suffix is 寂. Languid has an air of "forced kawaii" about it, which is why the pitch line on some samples went bonkers. I really like Languid! The only complaint is the noise, but you kind of need it for that kind of bank.
• Strong's suffix is 力. Just like Languid, there are some issues. The main issue is pitch lines. When the pitch lines get deep fried, it makes this really weird noise. Most of the time you can fix it if there's just enough vowel with a normal pitch line. 
• Roki had no suffix, so I used "ro". Just like Lonely, Roki fixes the problems of Strong. However, you're trading cuteness for stability. 
• Digital had no suffix, so I used "D". Digital is the brightest and clearest bank of them all. It sounds pretty darn great!

There is one more CV bank in addition to those five. Thalia is a strong bank. I understand fully that strong banks are the most popular, but I'm not a really big fan of strong banks. (Often when I listen to extremely popular modern UTAU videos I think "Why are you yelling at me? Please stop yelling at me.")

It's a good bank - especially for someone who wants to experiment with multi-pitch banks without jumping into CVVC or VCV.

Speaking of CVVC, I don't mess with it. I don't do English in UTAU and I'd rather just use CV than learn a whole new way of doing something. (That will probably change once the new system of OTOing is released, though!)

However, using Aya's "rose" bank as a CV bank gives some pretty awesome results. It is clear, but it is still soft in tone.

Now, the only banks left to look at are the VCV banks. From randomly clicking the samples, I had a feeling that Navy would be my least favorite.

Navy is a beautiful, high quality two pitch VCV. Objectively, it is an awesome bank. However, I just am not the biggest fan of those kinds of banks. If this were an UTAU's only bank, I would be shouting about how amazing the UTAU was. I'm just not that excited because I fell in love with the whispering bank that Kahun used, not a strong bank.

Eve is next on the list.
Eve is fine. It's a good bank. It is a healthy mix of Navy and Alice. Speaking of Alice . . .

AAAAAAAA!!! I LOVE THIS UTAU!! I don't even have to tune the Alice bank for it to sound amazing!!

The noise is a little much, but it's easy to mix that out or find a more forgiving resampler than the default one. That UST is a a basic UST with no tuning other than the default pitch lines. But it still sounds so amazing!! I love it so much!!

How can I download Utakata Aya?

The download page is right here. 

Go forth and make beautiful art with this wonderful UTAU! Whether you're like me and die of happiness when you hear a soft, sweet voice like Alice or if you like strong, powerful voices like Navy, Aya will be a great fit for you.