Italian Voice Bank Help

[MioDioDaVinci]

Very well, then. Now, I've been meaning to give one of my UTAUs an Italian bank/append for a while now, and now I finally have the time to record. I've made my own reclist by compiling three different reclists into one mega one (and adding a few phonemes I know appears in the Italian language), so I feel I'm about ready to start.

But, here's my problem: should I name the notes phonetically or as they are? (e.g, "chi" would be "ki" and "ci" would be "chi.")

That's the main problem I'm having. But, if I can't quite get that fixed, I was thinking about simply having a Japanese bank with an Italian accent.

In that cause, should the Italian pronunciation override the Japanese or the other way around? Such as "che" would sound more like "ke" and "ho" would be "o." I have a feeling this would make the bank a bit harder to use but would ensure that the accent's spot on...

Any help?

 

[baye]

You can always put a number after the phoneme to represent a different sound. Also, if you're worried about overriding samples, put the different samples in a different folder in the voicebank--then rename them as you please.

 

[Catgirl]

I'm glad to see someone else is trying an Italian list ;3;

I can tell you what I did with mine, I used a phonetic encoding, not orthographic encoding, following more or less the romaji convention except for those sounds like gli or gn* that are absent in Japanese. it's less work and also less ambiguous for users that are used to romaji encoding.

My Japanese voicebank is recorded with an obvious Italian accent (and while u's and r's are not the same, I find them acceptable) so I reused basically all phonemes in there except the "h*" ones that aren't needed since there are no aspirates in Italian.
However, if your u's are very closed and r's are soft, and if you haven't paid attention to o's and e's opening (and you have them mid-open or mixed), you can't reuse those phonemes.

In that cause, should the Italian pronunciation override the Japanese or the other way around? Such as \"che\" would sound more like \"ke\" and \"ho\" would be \"o.\" I have a feeling this would make the bank a bit harder to use but would ensure that the accent's spot on...

I think it'd be confusing...? You could alias "ho" to "o". but... eh. You can do like Fuuko says and add numbers or prefixes or something, but I think it makes things unnecessarily complicated... If you really want to use an orthographic convention, I'd make it as a separate voicebank, not to be mixed with the JP one.

Also, I don't think doing so would help much with accent, it's more like it would help those that have no clue about Italian phonetics and just expect to type the syllables like they're written...


By the way, if you do it don't do CCCVs like I did XD Seriously XD Do some VCs instead ^^ They sound generally better and it's even less recordings.

 

[MioDioDaVinci]

Ah, thank you so much! Now I understand how to go about the naming convention of the Italian bank. I'll be starting to record soon enough! Again, thank! ouo/

 

[Catgirl]

Good ^^

By the way, while I was doing something totally unrelated 10 minutes ago, I thought another reason of why going with phonetic romaji-like convention is better XD; I'll just tell here for the sake of completeness.

It's the S/Z problem.
You know Italian has 2 sounds associated with S (phonetically S and Z) and 2 with Z (phonetically DZ and TS) that are used differently depending on where they are in a word and what they have around them (and also depend on regional accents).
If you use an orthographic convention, it's going to be extremely confusing, you'll eventually need a way to set them apart and you'd end up either using phonetic convention anyway or do something very counterintuitive and hard to remember like za1 za2 sa1 sa2 etc ^^;

Anyway, I'll look forward to your bank ^^ I'd like to have some other voice to use, and my own compatriots are still a bit reluctant to start working on an Italian bank, some are waiting for a complete reclist and my current one is crap (I'm currently remaking it) so they're just sitting there waiting for me to do the hard work haha XD; Not that I mind too much lol, I would do that anyway
If you need more help or someone to beta test, I'm here XD

 

[MioDioDaVinci]

One last thing I must ask; what VC recordings would you recommend to ensure a nice, smooth bank? I don't even know where to begin. ouo;;

 

[Catgirl]

Um, pretty much all extended Japanese bank (the kind that includes things like kwa gwa vya and so on), but you need to have a closed-vowel and an open-vowel version of each syllable with "e" and "o"
The fact that all syllables with "e" and "o" are doubled is pretty much the biggest hassle with Italian because they're really important for accent.
Then, as far as CCVs go, things with "r" in the middle like tra, pra, bra, kra etc. are really useful.

Then... idk XD I still need to make a proper reclist for when I'm going to rerecord everything, but in the meanwhile you might find useful to look at my current bank for reference -> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/32321210/Arianna-1.2-b3.rar
I don't have a proper list for it since I just recorded a JP bank with OREMO reclist and started adding the other phonemes randomly as they came to my mind...  :-_-: so it lacks of stuff, and please ignore all CCCVs and the CCVs that start with s or z  <___<;;;;; As I told you earlier, I found out later using VCs works better for them.
In fact I consider this bank a prototype, but even like this she can sing pretty good Italian already.

 

[F.S.]

hi, i was planning to make an italian version of my voicebank, i found a reclist that i think it's good but has lines like this: bob_bub_b3b_b5b, how do i prounounce the things with the numbers? and then how am i suppose to oto it?

 

[Thehyami]

hi, i was planning to make an italian version of my voicebank, i found a reclist that i think it's good but has lines like this: bob_bub_b3b_b5b, how do i prounounce the things with the numbers? and then how am i suppose to oto it?

I believe they're the second version of E and O, as what Catgirl said previously. Italian has open-vowel and close-vowel version of E and O. Close-vowel version of E would look like I, and close-vowel version of O would look like U. To make the open-vowel version, just lower your jaw more.