Forgotten Friday #169 - 真白結菜 / Mashiro Yuina

 I can't believe how many spoons working on my blog has used today. I can barely get one sent... I can't go three words without a massive typo. Thankfully, the bulk of the words have been written.

Forgotten Friday #169 - 真白結菜 / Mashiro Yuina

I said that that this would be material for when I don't really talk about the UTAU because all of the online information was hard coded into an image. Google Translate has tools for reading images, but I was like, naw. Now that I have the 400 megabtye bank, I can see she has quite a bit of character information.

So, she suffers from albinism and is sadly bullied by being called a vampire but uh. Let's pretend we didn't have access to her character information. She's apparently a legal adult at 23 years old, but is mentally and physically fourteen. If you want to find out what's making me uncomfortable, you gotta download the bank to find out yourself!

Who is Yuina Mashiro? (get it? because her skin is whiter than snow, and mashiro means like absolute white)

official art from bank

"I'm ugly!" Apple Bloom sobbed as she cried out.

She saw herself as a human in this meaty and stocky world for the first time, and she did not like it. Her big, beautiful pink eyes were now green, and her striking red hair was now a brassy orange. She scratched at the brown marks covering her face. "Why won't they come off?!

Before Emily could calm her down, she realized just how simultaneously angular and bulbous her face was. Small, closely set eyes. A giant nose. Lips that were too wide. She sobbed helplessly as Emily grabbed her shoulders and begged Apple Bloom to stop crying, "No, no Apps!! So many people would kill to be as beautiful as you! With your giant eyes, tiny nose, and full lips. You are so adorable!"

"But my hair ain't red!" Apple Bloom cried out, "And my eyes ain't red! And my nose is so big!" 

Emily stopped. Okay, so somehow, Apple Bloom hit her head so hard, she had no idea what humans looked like… despite literally being in front of a human. Did Apple Bloom just think that Emily was genuinely ugly with her deep auburn hair and deep blue eyes? Well, yes. Obviously. Though it was more about just being shaped like a human than the coloring itself. She shushed as motherly as she could before pulling out her phone and typing 'beautiful women'. She turned Apple Bloom towards her and scrolled through the image results. "These are some of the prettiest women in the world, and you look even prettier, you see?"

Apple Bloom gasped through her tears. They were all ugly! The smallest noses were still bulbous. The largest eyes were still tiny. And so many had bones in their faces that looked like they were about to break out of their skin. She sniffled softly. She was pretty by the standards of this world. "But my hair ain't red and my eyes ain't the color they're meant to be!"

"You want to look like Apple Bloom from the old television show?" Emily sighed as she hugged Apple Bloom close to her. "Well, I don't know if I can find you red contacts, but I can get you some box dye. We'll dye your hair. I can get you concealer, but your adorable little freckles are something I think Apple Bloom the pony would have."

"I reckon…" Apple Bloom sniffled again, this time more loudly. "I reckon I'd be happy if I had my hair the right color."

Emily pulled away from Apple Bloom and made rhythmic clicks with her tongue as she swiped around her phone's screen. She looked up at Apple Bloom and smiled. "I can get it tomorrow. But maybe you'll love your hair by tomorrow!" She put her phone in her pocket before leading Apple Bloom to a small table that Apple Bloom hadn't noticed earlier. There was a shiny white box sitting on it.

"Well…" Emily sighed. "Can you read English?"

"What's English?" Apple Bloom nervously shifted her weight.

"We're speaking English right now," Emily bit her lip. She wasn't going to believe that Apple Bloom was magically transported from a land of magical Equids, but she was fully believing that Apple Bloom truly believed that she was a magical pony. "Or… do you think we're speaking Pony?"

"The answer I think is right is wrong?" Apple Bloom nervously laughed as Emily pulled up a website on her phone and held it up for Apple Bloom to read. "Naw," Apple Bloom sighed, "that's just squiggles."

Emily let out a deep sigh as she picked up the box and opened it. "Thank the good Lord for accessibility features."

Thank the good Lord for accessibility features indeed! What's in the box?! Find out next time in the next installment of A Spectrum of Apple Skins!

How does Mashiro Yuina's bank sound?

Quick question! What's the point of a CV bank and a VCV bank being packaged together? You can get a CV bank from a VCV bank using the OTO file itself without modifying any files. 

The answer is... 2010. We didn't really know anything at all in 2010.

The poor thing nearly crashes UTAU. I'm on a mini-PC, but I'm pretty sure it's marginally better than the XP laptop I had in 2010.

7979!! That's how many aliases there are!! There's no prefix map. There's no list of pitches. You're just... woah. CV is going in the trash because I need all the help I can get.

So, six pitches of VCV. Woah. I was going to make my life hard until I realized that I can find the average pitch of each pitch by opening the folder in UTAU and looking at the average pitch as opposed to opening a few FRQ files from each pitch to find the correct pitch for the prefix map... ayayay.

Two up: D#5

One up: B4

Base: G#4

One down: D4

Two down: B3

Original sound: A#3

Original sound does not fit with the rest of the bank.

I... After all this work, I listen and it sounds like it was formant shifted and sounds unnatural. Like, I was like "hahaha, okay now show me what it sounds like UTAU! oh. okay."

So you know when things are just kind of funny in a way that makes you hurt on the inside? The pitch that said "original sound" was in fact... the original sound. All five of the other pitches are that pitch formant shifted. The same thing could be achieved by just making everyone pinky promise to use the g flag. Boy howdy, if you could see my face right now, you would be concerned. 

The shifting done on the files sounds better than the g flag in UTAU, but everything could have just been shifted... once. It was 2010 and we didn't know better, but especially when my data cap was 7 GB in 2010, this would have just been a bad experience all around. Here's the original recordings:

Where can I download Yuina Mashiro?

The link to her nicovideo release is on her visual archive page. Her actual distribution page was lost when Geocities shut down, and NicoVideo was down for maintenance when I went to download her today. I had a canceled download in my history when I went to download her and then saw she was 400 megabytes zipped. Pressed retry and it magically worked. I started working on this at 5:30 PM and it is now 6:45 PM. I thought this was going to be an easy article!

It's up to you what you think of her, because I'm just shook at the audacity here to make a one pitch VCV + CV bank into a six pitch... And there wasn't even a prefix map!!