Honey, there's someone called Genre Change at the door, what should I do with him?

With the existence of blogs replacing traditional journals and MP3s replacing CDs, technology has definitely showed us what it can do. The world has accepted, albeit slowly, many genre changes over the years.

Yamaha has released an upgrade to their little-known vocal-synthesizing software released in 2004, the Vocaloid2, that has brought about a new genre change. Yes, they have found a way to replace human singing vocals with computer generated ones.

The Vocaloid twins Rin and Len singing the theme song for the anime Soukyuu no Fafner in both male and female voices. Vocaloid comes in two languages, English and Japanese, with a wide variety of different voices. Vocals are generated by lining lyrics next to music progression, which the Vocaloid will read and vocalise.

Though the vocals at times may seem a bit choppy and robotic, the program has met with positive reviews and is now very popular amongst Japanese cartoon fans especially (due to the fact that the Japanese Vocaloids like Rin and Len come in cute anime characters). The response for the blogging phenomenon as opposed to the print media was also smiled upon by many people. What about the new genres that were frowned upon instead?

Though genre change may sometimes bring advantages such as convenience and ease (like blogging), it may be worrying to some parties. There was once a time when people found it tedious and expensive to buy music CDs and records just to listen to a song. After the invention of the mp3 file, the world rejoiced to the ease of downloading and sharing music online. However, there were some parties who were unhappy about the change.

According to the website The Napster Controversy, the Recording Industry Association of America filed a lawsuit against Napster for copyright infringement, for distributing music for free amongst Napster users. Peer-to-peer sharing applications like Limewire and Ares are also under fire for sharing and distributing music and movies for free to millions of users everyday. According to Paul Gil (2008) the big ruckus is over the fact that music and movie artists claim that they are not paid rightfully when users share files without the artists' express permission; that users are infringing their copyrights.

In thirty years, will we still see the Recording Industry Association of America filing lawsuits against every music sharing website or application out there? Will they ever be able to win the war? "It is probably not a good thing to have laws that are both unenforceable and widely ignored. The alternative is to come up with a way of managing copyright and royalties that recognizes reality," says Gil (2008). With genre change more and more imminent as the days go by, all we can do is applaud its genius or embrace and adapt to its flaws.


References:

2008, Soukyuu no Fafner OP (Vocaloid Rin & Len), Youtube, viewed 11 November 2008,
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm18-gHt-Vk>

2005, Introduction: About Vocaloid, Vocaloid.com, viewed 11 November 2008,
<http://www.vocaloid.com/en/introduction.html>

n.d., Napster Then and Now: A Brief History of Napster, The Napster Controversy, viewed 11 November 2008,
<http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Spring01/Burkhalter/Napster%20history.html>

2007, Illegal music sharing the norm, Washington Times, viewed 11 November 2008,
<http://washingtontimes.com/news/2007/jul/28/illegal-music-sharing-the-norm/>

Gil, P 2008, Downloading Music MP3s: Peer to peer file sharing, About.com, viewed 11 November 2008,
<http://netforbeginners.about.com/cs/peersharing/a/aap2p.htm>