Forgotten Friday #72 - Kaita Kumone / 雲音カイタ

No one recognizes that you shouldn't mash together kun'yomi and on'yomi. I don't mean no one as in overseas people. I mean everyone in Japan, also. But, what can you expect? The reading of 月 is either, Getsu, Gatsu, or Tsuki. How does the protagonist of Death Note read "moon"? Light. The reading is Light. Is there any world where that makes sense? I actually thought the kanji would be 光 because at least that actually means "light". But no. 

Forgotten Friday #72 - Kaita Kumone / 雲音カイタ

I generally do my best to limit off topic discussions to Japanese UTAUs. Especially for Forgotten Friday articles. A user might have wandered off for several years, but then just randomly show up and read this if they speak English. If they don't speak English, they wouldn't really read this even if they did show up.

I did some digging. Don't Google the name in the character file ("enikaitamochi"). Or do, but you'll see a lot of stuff you probably wouldn't want to. (Soft-core prawns.) All of the accounts are very much from Japanese people who seem to not speak English. If you want to see her voice provider's most recent contact that I can find, it is universalPraesepe. It's really crazy because Kaita was getting covers in 2013, but then she straight up fell off. 

So, I have a feeling Kaita's voice provider won't show up again, and this does feel too important to put behind the break so here it is. 

At the time of writing this, it is April 19th. COVID-19 is really scary.

I live in a red state. For non-Americans, that means that my state (with the exceptions of a few places) hates the government. That's a bit of a stretch, because they would walk on coals for Reagan or Bush. Almost all rural areas are red, and all urban places are blue in America. So, when a governor in a blue city puts a lock-down order in place, the red rural area protests and just... Stands in the road. Because we're red from the top down here, there's no strict lock-down orders. No protesters at all.

And literally nothing has changed for the nearest part of the nearest city. Don't get me wrong - schools are closed. But, they're closed in Summer also. It took me a while to figure out, but then it hit me. Other than stores that probably employ like five people, everything is essential. I don't think anyone lives in that area except for restaurant workers and low level employees for major corporations. When I was getting physical therapy, the therapist told me that she was driving about an hour to get from her house to the clinic. There are non-essential workers in the entire city, but not in that section. And, you know those people know that they've been exposed... Meaning, I can see them thinking there's no reason to not just go get vegetables to plant from the hardware store. 

So, when I hear about opening the economy up... Not yet? Going through that part of the city after my necessary doctors appointment, it looked the same. The only thing you could really tell was different was the tornado damage from before COVID-19. The only major difference if it was opened up here would be kids going back to school to finish the year (which is borked quite a bit because it's actually illegal for my area to have online-only school due to some children literally not having internet access) and places like the Senior Citizens Center opening back up. Going to a blue city, it was eerie and empty. A red city? It was just normal life. 

Thanks for listening to my rant. For me, nothing has really changed.

Who is Kaita Kumone?

Official Icon from UTAU Fandom

Kaita has a ukulele, loves Nutella, and hates peanut butter. She's bold and a bit rude, but that's just because she doesn't realize the consequences of her actions. 

I almost got to my required word count just through the whole rant about how things are exactly the same, so next section.

How is Kumone Kaita's bank?

Kaita is a CV hiragana encoded bank with limited English capabilities through monophoneme recordings of end consonants. In the early days, this was an issue as the samples would bug out if there was no pitch in the samples at all, but that bug has been properly squashed since then. 

I won't play with the limited English capabilities, because banks like this don't have a uniform structure, so I have to edit a UST for each one. Also, it's kind of obvious what it will sound like ("Engrish" with easier to use end consonants.) However, she does have samples using "l", but they are encoded as ぁ as opposed to "la". I had no idea what it would be until I clicked on the sample, though, because I had forgotten that trick. 

The samples do have a bit of reverb, and the OTOs don't exist. She has a file called "x", and it caused the tester UST where I had used "x" as opposed to "R" for tuning purposes have this really weird whine. The consonants are cut in half in some places, because that was something people did when they didn't know how to do OTOs. 

It's a really sweet voice type, and the noise isn't enough to detract from the voice itself, but the cut consonants make it a little less fun to work with.

Where can I download Kumone Kaita?

There may very well be another bank (this was her Act 2), but her entire online presence was slashed and burned years ago. To get this bank in specific, go to her UTAU Fandom page. 

The bank is a victim of its era. If I had the raw recordings, I could spruce it up and it would be a really great bank for its era. But cut consonants cause problems that can't really be fixed. When I get further and further into 2010 banks, this will crop up a lot more. 2009 banks tended to not know what they were doing and were okay with that, whereas 2010 banks thought they knew how to fix the issue, but they went about it in the worst way possible.

I do like the bank, though.