Forgotten Friday #85 - 唄美キョコ / Kyoko Utami

Every time I mildly touch drama in the fandom, I just shut down and ask myself, "Why am I here if people don't seem to like me being here?" But then I sit down and I convert a VCV bank to CVVC and a CV bank to pseudo-CVVC and I'm like.. oh. that's why. I legitimately enjoy the technical aspects of the software. I look at the numbers for the blog, and I can see that people are reading it. I think I should be more of a "grey wall" to keep drama from affecting the blog beyond my own self-doubt. I'll think harder about writing anything remotely controversial from now.

Forgotten Friday #85 - 唄美キョコ / Kyoko Utami

It's not really a big deal what I did... But I am proud of myself! The UTAU Fandom page for Kyoko only had her Act 1, so I just looked on YouTube and found her Act 2 almost immediately. I added the link for the distribution video as opposed to the direct Mediafire link due to my experience with the MMD sphere. (Direct linking has turned passwords into scavenger hunts.)

Completely regardless of how good or bad Kyoko is (I haven't checked), her voice provider, Mikau was serious business. (Note, the readme says Mikau is the voice provider, but the UTAU Fandom page says it is Immy. The kanji is different also, so... Who knows!) Mikau literally bought a URL for her UTAU blog. Even if it's not expensive, money changed hands for an online presence! Only one page of it was archived, and there's a review of wig stores. That's cool!

So, I'm pumped to see how it turned out. One of the videos for Kyoko mentioned that she was recorded in a studio settings. The intros for the songs were so long on the videos checked, I clicked off before the voice started singing. Don't want to ruin the surprise!

Who is Utami Kyoko?

Official Icon from Bank

So, first, Kyoko has a rule that you cannot edit her samples. No pass through with noise filter, no pseudo-CVVC... None of that. I feel like there's an understood rule that you should never edit an UTAU's samples, but I just found out how to do pseudo-CVVC and I'm in love with the concept.

But not for Kyoko, because the readme said not to. And it's important to respect rules when they are in plain English, right in your face.

Kyoko is the fourth UTAU of her group. She is related to Hotaru Utami and Kotone Utami. Those names look really similar and I thought I wrote an article on Hotaru until I saw the art for this specific Hotaru.

She is only thirteen years old and is just under five feet tall. Her birthday is June 24th, 1997. She loves open spaces, dinosaurs, and cookies. (Rawr! Is dinosaur for I love you!!) 

She dislikes Kaito, scary people, and the dark. She behaves as a small child would, though like... Once you hit a certain age, you start to think of thirteen year olds as toddlers... So that's just stating the obvious that a young child would act like a young child!

How are Kyoko Utami's banks?

Her first bank, simply named kyokovoice was recorded in mid 2010. Her voice provider was unable to say the Japanese R, so she has English "r" and "l" samples instead. Her OTOs are undone, but thankfully have the aliases.

The samples are cut so that you don't "need OTOs". The samples starts directly when the consonant starts, so that there's no pause. Aside from the no OTOs thing, this is an insanely high quality bank for the era it was from. 

Her second bank was simply "Utami Kyoko". She has OTOs, but they are like... I don't get it, but okay. The "ni" sample was aliased with "?" for some reason.

aaaand... The act 2 is the same exact bank, but with a new OTO file. I feel silly!

whoops.

Where can I download Utami Kyoko?

You can download her from her UTAU fandom page. It's an insanely good UTAU - I just wish that there actually had been an Act 2.