And got an answer from the marketing dept, but hoping SynthV reconsiders and makes it available without ‘special license’ negotiations
I’m waiting for a similar answer from Yamaha, and will update here.
I believe AI software toolkits and ‘personas’ should be kept separate.
Your thoughts?
Kanru hasn’t been on these forums in years. If you really need an official response, contact [email protected].
That said, the EULA is quite clear on the matter.
(1) When Presenting a Rendition, the User must not use names other than designated by Dreamtonics to identify the SVD.
You cannot claim that the vocals were produced by a human or provide a name that doesn’t match the actual SVD (singing voice database) used, but you are also not required to declare that SynthV was used.
Put simply, you must either not credit the vocals at all or use the name of the SVD as attribution.
Keep in mind that some SVDs will have different terms, for example the free “lite” versions all require attribution.
As for Vocaloid and Yamaha, it is largely a similar situation but you should always check the EULA for the specific product.
You are not required to attribute the vocals to SynthV or the voice database.
You’re just not allowed to lie and claim you’re the vocalist. To use your virtual instrument example, it would be silly and deceptive to use a piano VST and credit yourself as a pianist.
The only thing the Dreamtonics EULA prevents is people trying to deceive their audience.
“… To use your virtual instrument example, it would be silly and deceptive to use a piano VST and credit yourself as a pianist…”
Honestly, this is not making sense to me in the context. Yes, I would be the song creator (the whole) of which the piano vst is but part of the toolkit to create the whole song.
Just like melodyne is not the perfect pitch singer of a song but a tool to make the singer the star.
Exactly. There is nothing preventing you from attributing the song or any other part of it to yourself or your brand. You just can’t claim to be the vocalist, just like you wouldn’t claim to be a pianist after using a piano VST. It’s the same.
It seems you’ve already been offered an exception for your “virtual character” thing anyway so I’m not sure what the issue is.
I could go on about a music video where you could see the ‘keyboardist’ hold down a single key and the VST plays an arpeggio… But I think I’ll digress.
The ‘exception’ involves negotiating a special license, not a confirmed grant of license as Yamaha and the other provider mentioned in the thread provide.
At this point I’ll wait and hope this excercise provides food for thought if nothing else.
Best wishes.
My own intentions are to post my songs online under my artist band name. I won’t be mentioning Synth V, but nor will I be attributing the vocals to anyone else. So, reading the above, I should be OK there.
In my personal opinion, the Synth V voice is no different from a synth preset – strings, piano, whatever. The only artist / creator is the person who plays the synth and creates the song or piece of music. The precedent for this is the mountain of material [loops, sound banks, presets, commercial midi packs etc.] where there’s no question of accreditation. Synth V actually requires far more creator input than any of these things. As I say, this is only my personal opinion
It will be interesting to see how things go when AI requires much less creator input!
I agree with you. On one hand, I think Dreamtonics and their partners need to treat these voices the same way that “most” of the industry has already come around to when licensing samples. On the other hand, I think it is a dumb idea to “pretend” that these singers are somehow someone else. I think it’s a risky chance to take with your audience, and audiences don’t like feeling duped. Rember Milli Vanilli? So for me, the current licensing won’t affect me much but still, their licensing should mimic what the rest of the industry is already doing and has been doing for years now.
It seems the time you’ll run foul of the licensing terms is if you ever show any of yr band members move (sync) their lips to the voicebank.
If your showing the back of their heads or other such wide shot… Etc you’re good to go.
It’s deceptive on another whole level if you ask me.
It’s true, only the artiste (creator) fine tuning, adding ‘breathiness’… Adding a ‘twang’… Is what makes the source voice bank, unique to each song.
I’m reminded of an ‘anime complex’ where it seems people are falling in love with the idea of a virtual Kevin persona… And not seeing the voice bank for what it is… Voice patches.
The person who sang the song. It doesn’t matter how good their singing is, just that they’re the one that sang the song. If their vocals are edited (which they are) then the person in that role is credited as a mixing engineer or similar, not a vocalist.
If you want to credit yourself for generated vocals, call yourself the “vocal editor” or “vocal programmer”. Using a singing synthesizer doesn’t make you a vocalist, it’s really as simple as that.
You can evaluate for yourself the situation with the Chinese user mentioned above who encountered issues with the license. In that case the main problem was not the video, it was that they had credited themselves as the singer. The issue was resolved by changing their role in the attributions to reflect what they actually did.
So “if you ever show any of yr band members move (sync) their lips to the voicebank” is a clear exaggeration of what you were actually told.
You’re still not getting the point. Without melodyne those singers won’t have a career. Yet no one ‘credits’, ‘voice engineering’ by so and so…
The ‘singer’ (who can’t hold pitch /key) walks away with the entire credit.
I agree with @claire on this one, but I get your point as well. I think the thing we forget as musicians is that the “audience” is more concerned with relating to a “personality” so regardless of the fact that their voices were greatly helped by Auto Tune/Melodyne there is still a “persona” for the listener to relate to. Of course, this has nothing to do with licensing, and I still agree with you that they should just treat the licensing the same way the industry treats “samples”, but if musicians want to use voicebanks for the main show in their compositions than they are going to need to find a way to connect with the audience on a personal level if it can’t be done through the vocal and even when the vocals do belong to a real person, they have to create a story about themselves for the fan to give a care. Unfortunately, good or even the greatest song is not enough to gain a following that can sustain you as a full time musician. That’s just music marketing 101.
Hello,
While obviously you’re right about the ‘not having to name the Dreamworks voice’, your comment on the pianist is wrong. If you play a keyboard part in, record the midi, and the sound is made by a vst then you are the pianist, the vst is ‘only’ an instrument.
I would even go as far as saying that if you programmed the midi part you are still the pianist.
It’s a bit like the AI arguments. an AI is not the originator of the work, the artist is the person who supplied the idea (instructions) to the AI, the AI is only an instrument.
This is a fair point, perhaps the piano VST was a poor example because the input to create the MIDI is actually comparable to the act of playing piano, whereas the operation of SynthV is clearly not singing and it would be deceptive to claim otherwise.
There is actually some precident for similar attributions, in which people who play a synthesizer instrument are credited for “synthesizer” and those who “supply the ideas” as you put it are credited as “synthesizer programmer” (and the people who do both are credited as both).
There are even high-profile examples for vocal synths, though in this case it’s Vocaloid and they chose to be up-front about their use and credit the vocals to the software while putting the operator as a “Programmer” among other roles.
Sometimes one just hasta throw up their hands and give up. Maybe someone else comes along and explains the forest for the trees.