But Vocaloid is far more than just that what really made Vocaloid special was its voice banks, nicknamed Vocaloids, who are characterized as their own individual singers with their own, usually anime-styled, official character designs. If that was all that Vocaloid was, then it would have been a perfectly functional software useful in music creation with little else to say about it. To use a Vocaloid, one simply has to load a voice bank (sold separately from the main software and produced by different companies), type in the lyrics of the song of their choosing, and tune the melody for said song, producing a fully synthesized singing voice (though a great deal of fine-tuning is usually necessary to have the result sound natural).
Functionally, Vocaloid works like a combination of Synthetic Voice Actor and Auto-Tune. Initially starting life as a science project in 2000, Yamaha developed the experiment into a commercial product, releasing it to the public on January 15, 2004. Vocaloid (portmanteau of 'vocal' and 'android' stylized as VOCALOID) is a singing voice synthesizing software created by university researcher Kenmochi Hideki and the Yamaha Corporation.
