Well, the way I see it, Vocaloids are instruments. They aren't intrinsically bad or good. Just like with all music, there are three things that define the quality of a piece of music:
1. The quality of composition (melody, rhytm, subjective)
2. The quality of arrangement (how well parts are written to different instruments, how well they work together, subjective)
3. The quality of performance (aside from stylistic choices, objective)
4. The quality of storage media (basically quality of the audio track... in many cases with music on youtube, it is horribly maimed by high compression rate and/or bad ideas such as playing a video on niconico, recording the audio through a
microphone to make a new video, or other such nonsense).
...FOUR things that define the quality of a piece of music.
Going with this, I'd say Vocaloids have a lot in common with 8bit and MIDI. For the end result to work, the original song needs to be a good one, the arrangement needs to be good, and the performance needs to be good. For 8bit and MIDI, the arrangement is synonymous to performance (aside from small things like rendering soundfont for MIDI files, but let's not nitpick). For Vocaloids, though, arrangement is usually the same as the original, with a de-voiced or voice-clean audio track on background and the Vocaloid performing the lyrics. The Vocaloid program is an instrument, and its user is the musician whose responsibility is to make it produce vocals that are in tune and sound at least vaguely like the original lyrics (the closer, the better), and transition smoothly and naturally from words and sentences to other. What I don't understand is how some people can possibly make a vocaloid perform
out of tune...
When these elements get together, though, Vocaloids can do pretty cool stuff. Most suck, like you would expect according to
Sturgeon's Law. But those that work... Some are amusing. Some are pretty cool, and some can be amazing (though this happens relatively rarely). Examples below.
Lady Gaga covers for example tends to work fairly well, assuming you care for her work in the first place:
Miku & Rin - TelephoneMegurine Luka - Bad RomanceKasane Teto - Bad RomanceMegurine Luka - Poker FaceKasane Teto - Poker FaceLuka's versions sound less like Engrish but the vibrato may be a bit excessive. Teto tends to be more crisp but the pronunciation is not quite as close to English...
Big Al - I'm Too Sexy ;
The original is hilarious. This made me outright lulz.Hatsune Miku - Still Alive in Japanese.
It's Better Than It Sounds.Akita Neru [Kagamine Rin] - God KnowsMegurine Luka - God KnowsKasane Teto - Fly Me To The Moon Evangelion flashbacks D:Megurine Luka - Scarborough Fair; Hardly a trace of Engrish here.
Kaito and
Miku versions of Finlandia hymn. Unsurprisingly, Vocaloids sing much much better in Finnish than in English. This is because Finnish and Japanese are both easy languages for computer to pronounce, English is not. You poor sods. Another good examples of Finnish vocaloid stuff are the
Finnish Anthem,
Karjalan Kunnailla,
Suomen laulu,
Lapsuuden toverille,
Ylioppilaslaulu and of course the immortal
Ieva's Polka aka Loituma Song.
Certain classical pieces translate pretty well to Vocaloids, for the exact same reason they translate well to 8bit or MIDI versions: They're just so good it's hard to make them
bad.
Hatsune Miku, Kagamine Len & Rin + Basso Continuo - Pachelbel's Canon in D Major ; simple and faithful to original.
Miku Choir - Bach, Fugue in g minor BWV 578Miku Choir - Beethoven Piano Sonata No.14 (Moonlight Sonata)Beethoven Symphony No.9, 4th Movement (Ode an die Freude)Hatsune Miku - Giuseppe Verdi: Requiem, "Libera Me" (no, not
that Libera Me.)
Maybe that's enough for one sitting...
