New Features in New Luka

Crypton’s upcoming revamp of Megurine Luka, tentatively called Megurine Luka V3, comes not only with newly recorded sound banks, but also several new capabilities. One of the new capabilities is apparently called Enhanced Voice Expression Control (E.V.E.C.), which allows for finer per-note adjustment of the voice synthesis process. A demo of the feature has been uploaded to SoundCloud. While E.V.E.C. is only applicable to Japanese singing, another new capability, this time with respect to Luka’s English, is slated to be revealed late November. Lastly, from the screenshots on the page, it appears that “Whisper”, “Soft”, “Power”, “Cute” and “Closed” will be among the voices available in the upcoming software package.

According to the official webpage, E.V.E.C. consists of three abilities afforded to the user—voice color, voice release and consonant extension, and these capabilities are only applicable to Japanese language singing.

The first feature allows the user to adjust what “color” voicing to use per note. In previous VOCALOID products, in order to have a vocal track change from a soft singing voice to a powerful voice mid-track, the user needed to create multiple tracks and manually crossfade between them. With the upcoming Luka software package, the user can directly select the “color” to be used. In the example image (of the first phrase in the demo song 03_pops, originally made for Hatsune Miku V2), the user has set it so that the first part of the phrase is using the “Soft” sound bank, with a transition to the “Cute” sound bank through a single “Power” note.

A part of the screenshot shows a single note (ra=[4 a]) that had been split into three parts: [4 a | a2 | Sil2], with the “a2” possibly referencing a phoneme from a different sound bank. It is not clear what this does to triphones, as technically this would require triphones of the different voice combinations, e.g. a power→soft triphone.

The second feature, voice release, allows the user to add in either a short or long exhaling breath sound to the end of a note, usually useful at ends of phrases. Both voice color and voice release can be set per note in Piapro Studio, although the page claims that such edits are possible in “VOCALOID Editor” by splitting up notes and manually editing phonemes.

The last feature, consonant extension, allows the repetition of a phoneme to reinforce and elongate a consonant sound.

A demonstration of E.V.E.C. is available in an embedded SoundCloud upload on the page, starting with an unadjusted phrase, followed by one adjusted to use a more powerful singing voice and then one with a weak whispery voice.