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.
Very interesting thread!
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.
Food for though : who’s the star singer here that should be attributed… Melodyne?
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.
By not evolving and understanding where this is all headed, first mover advantages are left behind.
For now, Yamaha have shown foresight
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’ll stop here as I can’t explain any better.
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.
Sometimes one just hasta throw up their hands and give up. Maybe someone else comes along and explains the forest for the trees.
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.
Of course to make it really awkward, although I can’t sing (throat issues) I can put a tune in, use something like waves tune, melodyne or JamOrigin midibass to get the midi, which I then put the words in in Synth V. But I think at this point it’s getting to sophisty so there’s no need for a reply to that.
However I’m working on a track at the moment where the main vocal is a male-fied version of Solaria, tuned down an octave in Soundforge then some filtering over the same parts done by Asterian and Solaria to give a single voice - how would I credit that?
Oh yeah that’s an interesting one, and in some cases a bit of a grey area (and also a cool idea, I hope it works out well for you!).
I think your situation is simpler, but I’ll first go over the potential pitfalls and complications:
For example, this is an official vocal synth version of a song by Tacitly, made by KIRA. Notably, the vocal synth version is not available for sale or on streaming platforms like Spotify (perhaps because of this grey area issue).
This song uses Hatsune Miku and GUMI (Vocaloid products) as the main vocals, however people familiar with vocal synths noticed they sounded an awful lot like Tsurumaki Maki and Stardust Infinity (SynthV voice databases) in certain places.
So while I can’t say this for certain, it seems like a similar technique was used (perhaps using Zynaptiq Morph 2 or similar) to combine the two vocals, with the goal of maintaining the qualities of the Vocaloid synths with the added realism of SynthV.
It’s possible if this song were to be sold commercially they would have to specify Maki and Stardust as supporting vocals or similar in the metadata/description, but it’s a new enough technique that we don’t really have precident for it (and it’s also important to note this is combining two competing products).
(edit: one thing I initially neglected to mention is that Maki and Stardust do not have the same license terms as the first-party Dreamtonics ones, so their requirements may vary somewhat, but the original statement remains true if we were to apply the situation to the Dreamtonics products)
As for your situation with Solaria and Asterian, I think you have a few options:
You can also see Eclipsed Sounds’ statement on the use of their products as the input to voice changer models such as the Vocaloid6 Vocalochanger (keep in mind that statements by Eclipsed Sounds to not affect terms for voice databases other than Solaria, Asterian, and potential future products by them specifically):
This part is especially relevant:
While it is not required if using the full version of the voice database, we would greatly appreciate if users who utilize exported audio for this purpose would also credit our voice databases for the initial rendition in order to acknowledge our team’s hard work on our vocals.
haha dude @Chris, if you like Vocaloid, use it! Whether that’s for the program itself, or the company’s wording of their policies.
Sounds to me like Dreamtonics is just covering their bases. Do they really care if I do this? Probably not. But if Disney makes a new musical, using SakiAI to voice the main character, but credit the singing to a different person/character? That’s probably why they have a “policy” in place.
How about the case of a violin VST - let’s say, Joshua Bell violin. I could use that VST without mentioning it by name. OR I could say “created with Joshua Bell Violin”. But I cannot say “Violin played live by Andre Beller” or “Violin created with Yamaha DX-7”
Great discussion! This topic really is going to become a ‘thing’ as AI develops. I’m old enough to remember similar debates when sampling was a new thing…and even further back, when drum machines became widely available.
Btw, I contacted Eclipsed Sounds, for SOLARIA; I just wanted to check if what I wanted to do was okay. Their license is clear on the restrictions on how SOLARIA should be credited, but it’s allowable to give no vocal credit at all, which is what I’m doing. They were extremely helpful
IMO, we’re at the point where Synth V is an amazing tool. Its AI component is limited to minor voice articulations. It doesn’t write the lyrics for you, it doesn’t write the melody, and it doesn’t construct the song. I feel I’m in complete creative control. When that stops…maybe I’ll take singing lessons!
For sure. For the time being we have 15+ years of precident for commercially successful vocal synth music, but that won’t always be the case and things may change.
Additionally, vocal synth music has only had limited success breaking into English markets in that 15+ year history. There’s always the possibility that a different approach is necessary for a different market, but I do think it’s valuable to be aware (at least at a basic level) of the history in the Japanese/Chinese markets where it has become a somewhat normalized category of music that can stand on its own.
Despite the AI aspect, SynthV Studio really doesn’t play any different of a role in creation than the first successful Vocaloid products did.
The main differences are:
It’ll certainly get more nuanced if/when the software starts to encroach on more of the creative process though.
Blockquote […] your song will get more traffic if you label it with “ft. Solaria” simply because people will search for songs using Solaria and discover your music that way)
Ah, yes, I hadn’t considered that. Makes sense. And that background info is useful to know, thanks.
Thanks for that.
If you’re interested I have put up When Does Protest Become Simply Whining | Dored | DOD where track 3 (lying on the Floor) is the track with the manipulated/combined vocal.
