Wiki Wednesday #75 - 三ヶ猫の空♂ / mikeneko_tom's Kuu

4/5. The icon for this bank is named Kuu. But, to confirm it was Kuu, I had to track down the UTAU Visual Archive page... It was amazing it even existed. Please don't name your UTAUs like this. This UTAU might secretly have ten videos with a hundred thousand views or some nonsense because there's no actual way to... you know... search this name and get results. Also, what are ya trying to do to the poor Westerners who see Sora and think Sora! I have no idea how I found this UTAU, to be honest. The link just kind of... was in my spreadsheet with no reference to the UTAU Wiki. 

Wiki Wednesday #75 - 三ヶ猫の空♂ / mikeneko_tom's Kuu

In the words of Avril Lavigne, "Why you gotta go make things so complicated?" This UTAU's name uses the on'yomi of the kanji for sky. Which all the weeaboos know is read as sora. Sky = sora is the kind of thing you pick up just from watching subbed anime intros! Besides that, kanji hanging out all by themselves tend to have the kun'yomi reading. 車輪, or vehicle wheel, uses the on'yomis of "sha" and "rin". Separately, as "car" and "ring", they used the kun'yomi of "kuruma" and "wa". (Fun note. Body parts tend to just make things kun'yomi for no... real reason? Finger-ring, 指輪, is "yubiwa".)

So, this fella done did a variety of things. They named their UTAU something that can't be Googled and is shared with a Chinese UTAU. Then, they gave the UTAU a reading that you wouldn't expect. It's completely valid, but you wouldn't expect it. And then! The only way to find out the reading is to just assume that the icon name is the UTAU name! If it weren't for Visual Archive, the only way to find the reading would be to download the bank and find the icon image. That's... a lot! 

Why? 

Who is Kuu?

Official Icon Packaged with Bank

Kuu is fifteen and his personality is... nature. His favorite thing is Johnny the Fish. Is Johnny the fish a real fish? Is it a giant stuffed animal? He doesn't like demons and... that's it. No idea if he's just wearing a costume or if he's an actual cat. I mean, he hates vegetables... but that seems like a recurring theme here. (How many times have I told all you guys about how great roasting vegetables is at this point?)

Mikeneko Tom sounds like a girl, but Tom is generally a name assigned to males... In Western countries. And I'd Nancy Drew it... but all of Tom's social media has either been purged, or there was no social media to begin with and the addresses in the readme are junk! I can't even decide which pronouns to use for the voice provider! I mean, the obvious choice is they, but still! This is a giant mystery!

How is Kuu's voice bank?

It exists and I can see it with my own eyes. It makes sense. Files hold sound, and the sound is played in sequence after being manipulated by the resampler. I'm not sitting here wondering about anything. The average pitch is C4, and playing the samples outside of UTAU shows that there is quite a bit of noise. 

And, we got these kinds of OTOs:

Don't get me wrong. When you're extremely skilled as passing as neurotypical while not being neurotypical, you kind of just pick a personality. And for a while, I picked a snarky, know-it-all persona. And it's fun, ya know! Constant chances to make wordplay and actually showing emotions! I try to stick to happy-go-lucky everything is wonderful now. And I'm good at it, too! I think that's closest to who I naturally am. But, you know, playing as that snarky know-it-all is fun until you realize how grating it is to other people. I'm grateful when there's a person who will never even know this blog exists who makes the strangest choices so that I can dust off the old persona and play around with it for a bit. Because, like, why?! 

And what stinks is that I really like the voice! It doesn't match the character information, really. But it's still nice!

Where can I download Kuu?

You can download him from his download page. If you want to. It's a good voice, but why were these choices made.