Shobo Baba is the song engineer for LUMi. He's been around since Vocaloid was called "Daisy Project" so he's the oldest member of the development team.
When he first heard of LUMi's concept, he images such as "Transparency" "Mysterious" "Ocean" "Jellyfish". Those keywords are still unchanged. His job is to make LUMi's voice so the image is important, but the words that LUMi sings may be like Suprematism (A technique of art expression through abstracts, such as a simple combination of geometric patterns and figures. It started from Russia in the 1910s).
He spoke about how new challenges arise whenever a new Vocaloid is made since to there's more know-how of producing the bank. Currently, he believes that is quite possible for a human voice to be realised. The same is true for the LUMi library, aiming at singing more vividly. He thinks that you can fully enjoy its charm with solid striking, but since it incorporates elements that increase the brilliance further in the driven tuning, even from the viewer's side, it sounds richer as you use it he thinks that you can feel the depths of deepness. In this way, he believes that LUMi can be a musical instrument that changes according to the creator.
He talked about how keeping good voices in the image as long as possible while keeping good conditions for a long time places a heavy burden on the voice actor, so even professionals. After recording the necessary phonemes, optional phonemes were recorded to increase the quality of the bank.
During the optional recordings however, Ms. Ohara collapsed due to a throat condition. She regretted that she couldn't continue to the end. Fortunately, they got the opportunity to record again and get their revenge of disappointed feelings. Since Ms. Ohara wanted to record at 200%, Ava described the third record as unusual.
In the library production, it was not unusual for issues to arise about tone and other qualities of the voice. He said on the recording side of things, it progressed smoothly as saying "there aren't much recordings." Ohara's skill as a voice actor excelled here, though he did understand the demand it took from her. As he looks back, he says that they were just admiring unparalleled professionalism.
Before he started to work on Vocaloid, he was doing music production for TV commercials and programs, but the dream at the time was to make soundtracks for Hollywood movies. He wanted to fulfill that dream with LUMi.
To him, LUMi's voice sounds both organic and inorganic. It feels so due to the two aspects of human life and something not human living together. So he thinks it fits perfectly to those that depicted a human drama (like a romantic movie), but also like a science fiction that drew from the future.
Due to LUMi have both necessary phonemes (diphones) and optional phonemes (triphones), LUMi would be able to synthesise all the pronunciations in Japanese (Triphones of other libraries are often used more frequently). Since this is a feature only of LUMi's library (?), it is likely the range of expression on the creator's side will increase.
He wishes that LUMi will exceeds expectations of people. Nowadays, there are times where people say "Is this Vocaloid?!" or "Almost human!" and it is very encouraging the to development team. He thinks that loved musical instruments are instruments that should be used. He wonders if his attachment will increase by using her everyday, since he get absorbed quickly, a good song is born and breaks...
He hopes to see such a future.