Forgotten Friday #61 - Kazumi Kawa / 川カズミ

There are two things that almost always cheer me up. Obtaining useless items and eating. Of course, being sick, I ate until I got an awful tummy ache yesterday. Two days in a row of eating around 2,000 calories means that I know I'll balloon up if I don't put my foot down and eat less. So okay, food is out. Obtaining useless objects? That's where this blog comes in. Feel ill and can't write well? Download UTAU banks. Sadly, my internet is metered and I don't know when I'll be up at 2 AM again. So... What do I do? Live with feeling this way, I guess.

Forgotten Friday #61 - Kazumi Kawa / 川カズミ

Kazumi is a 2010 UTAU. I remember 2009 pretty well and can put names to avatars, but once the floodgates opened, I really just don't remember much at all. Probably has to do with the fact that I actually can't remember the majority of 2010 as a human. I mean... Was I a sophomore? What classes did I take? If I really, really think hard, I can remember doing things that were obviously manic, meaning that I was too manic to actually make and store memories that could be accessed when I wasn't manic. I mean, you might dig up an article written when I was manic that had me listing off everything I knew about 2010, but I wouldn't remember that either because I'm not manic!

Who is Kazumi Kawa?

Official Icon Packaged with Bank

So, Kazumi isn't a word. It's a name. Like, if I said "Anna means grace", I have an argument. That's what the name "Hannah" meant in Hebrew, but like, is that the same thing?

Now, when you flip that to Japanese, you have a whole different argument... If you supply kanji. Without kanji, a name is just a name. So let's have fun and pick kanji that would possibly work so that it means something close to the stated meaning: beautiful.

First, "zumi" isn't a valid on'yomi or kun'yomi. Even if it were, it doesn't matter because we know that her voice provider, DawnRules, intended for the name to include 美, which has an on'yomi which is "mi". If we don't stick to "put on'yomis with on'yomis", we can use several different kanji with "kazu" as the kun'yomi. The only one of those I could realistically expect someone with a beginner level of Japanese to be able to read is "数", which means "number". But 僎 looks really cool and means "collect". So, 僎美 looks cool and kind of means "collect beauty". As a bonus, Google Translate spits this out as Beauty!

But, like, you'd still write the given name in kana for aesthetics. But by the same token, 眉 (eyebrow) also has an on'yomi of "mi", so you have to be trying to get what DawnRules wanted to get what she wanted.

So uh, sorry about that. Apparently DawnRules went by Mei-P. I assumed she would be named Dawn, but apparently her name was May! With a "y" and not an "e", of course. 

Would anyone be offended at this point if I just left it at "Idk? Is she a robot or a cat human hybrid? She was made by two scientists, but she also has parents. I don't even know."

So many UTAUs were just created by scientists. I guess most of them are meant to be robots? But I never really liked the robots angle. I do get it. One of the most famous UTAU songs is "Song of the Earred Robot", but I still don't know! I don't even know if Kazumi is a robot! 

How is Kazumi Kawa's bank?

So, let me start by saying that while this is a 2010 bank, it is also DawnRules's third attempt. So, what will we see when we pop her open? A one pitch, romaji encoded CV bank with an average pitch of E4. How are the OTOs?

You know when you give someone a task and they literally do something else really well? The OTOs are wrong, but I can tell how much effort went into making them wrong and I can see instantly what they were told to do.

You see, someone told DawnRules to put the pink line where the red line goes, the blue line were the green line goes, and it's a mess. 

The recording quality is actually surprisingly good for this era. DawnRules was young enough at the time that I can't tell you if this voice is young or voice acted. I will put my chips on the kid was just young. Sadly, some samples aren't very usable and would require a bit of work to get working perfectly. It's a pretty common voice type and the recordings are nice when there aren't errors. I don't really think that there'd be much use of using this UTAU unless for history purposes. 

Where can I download Kawa Kazumi?

You can find Kazumi's Act 3 voicebank on her Wikia page. As stated earlier, this bank is mostly for fun, historical purposes as there are errors that make usage difficult. Those errors permeated the early fandom, so most old banks like this are likely to have those errors. If you find joy in working hard to minimize those errors and make a great result, then this is a good project for you.