VOCALOID: Wowaka -'Unknown Mother Goose' Song Study

pleaseee do more vocaloid. I have such a great time watching you react to it. Been in the fandom since 2010 and I love seeing people who dont know much about it get into it. I subbed to the patreon just for this!

Great video! Absolutely would like to see you dissect Wowaka more in the future!

I think you'd love the Hoshimatic Project cover! It's a group started by Hololive's Suisei, with Tokino Sora, Natsuiro Matsuri, Aki Rosenthal, Oozora Subaru, Tokoyami Towa, Momosuzu Nene, Hakui Koyori, Kazama Iroha and (now graduated) Sakamata Chloe

I would love more Wowaka! There are a lot of lyrics of his that are intentionally unclear and for interpretation! And yes, he does do the fast part.

You have to react to Ado cover of it ! It’s truly beautiful.

Wowaka was a truly beautiful artist who was taken from us far too soon. This was one of the songs that really hooked me into vocaloid and other Japanese electronic music. I cried the first time I realized I could understand the lyrics in Japanese and it was a moment I always look back on for motivation to continue my studies. I'll update with a couple things I know about the lyrics once I'm off work, unless other people beat me to it, but first I will say his other works are fantastic and incredibly deep. Rolling Girl, Unhappy Refrain and World End Dance Hall are all some of the best vocaloid pieces of all time. Edit: Alright, I'm back with my write up. Wowaka did this song as a part of Miku's 10th anniversary alongside DECO*27 releasing Hibana. You can find him talking about this song in an interview he did for the event, as well as a twitter post made around the same time. These two links are the English translations for both of these, in case you wanted to read his own thoughts yourself. https://vgperson.com/vocalinterview.php?view=wowakadeconatalie https://kazarinn.tumblr.com/post/164575872097/translation-of-wowakas-statement-regarding-his But, to very briefly summarize, after releasing the album Unhappy Refrain he felt that he became disillusioned with the scene and was struggling with his own identity and so he stopped doing vocaloid. He was struggling to feel as if people actually saw him as the producer within the songs or if they only saw Miku. To quote: "It wasn't like I was looking at the Vocaloid scene objectively, but felt more like a blind 'Me, me, me... What about me?'" He goes on to talk about his time in a band, the comparisons between his vocaloid vs. real singing, and what brought him to making music in the first place, finishing with "I decided to make a song about my relation to Hatsune Miku, and put in everything I’m talking about. So along those lines, I had Miku sing my own words for the first time." もう一回、　誰も知らないその想いこの声に預けてみてもいいかな / mou ikkai, dare mo shiranai sono omoi kono koe ni azukete mite mo ii kana "Maybe one more time this voice can safeguard [my] unknown feelings" It's a deeply personal introspection on his journey as an artist and a deep dive into the connection between an artist, the medium, and the audience. Some notes about the rest of the lyrics: - "Hitoribocchi" typically gets translated as "alone", but in my experience this isn't typically the "alone" of a quiet night reading a book, but a stronger isolation akin to being lost, socially outcast, or abandoned (or a light hearted joke about such a thing) - Many translations will add in subjects that aren't actually in the actual material, so in many cases it will often be ambiguous as to whether something refers to "I", "they" or "you", which is sometimes intentional. in this specific case, if something doesn't have "atashi" "boku" or "anata" in the line, any of these pronouns is implied or ambiguous. (This song has many points where it's totally ambiguous grammatically in a way that's just illegal in English) - It's often not important for understanding the song, but translations and lyric videos will desync the lyrics to fit Japanese's sentence structure into English; often you'll have the line in English actually being the next line in Japanese