輔一音金 ⚙ Yuuichi Otogane (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
heart_hidden_in_binary) wrote2014-01-12 12:00 pm
heart_hidden_in_binary) wrote2014-01-12 12:00 pm
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OKAY so if you've talked with Yuuichi for more than like... two comments you've probably noticed he makes a lot of noise! He is a little like a parakeet or other bird capable of mimicry in that he's constantly inserting little chirps and bits of music into conversation, so I figured it might be helpful to go into how/why.
First off! Yuuichi is a robot! Specifically, he is a robot who was created to bridge the gap of understanding between humans and robots by being able to feel the way humans did! ...This actually initially failed completely— his father wasn't able to program a heart for him, and he wandered around emotionless for several years. THIS WAS FIXED LATER, but it was through Yuuichi's efforts, rather than his father's.
Anyway, the problem became that while Yuuichi had finally gotten himself a feel or two, he didn't have any way to express it. His father had programmed in facial expressions, but it turned out that in practice they still didn't look quite right and overall looked just off enough to creep most people out in the same way things like wax figures/creepy puppets do. While he could resort to really exaggerated body language instead, that plus his eternal lineface also came off kind of offputting. This lead to him getting misread frequently, because unless someone knew him extremely well they had no idea what he was feeling!
Solution? ...well initially it was keep all of his social interaction to the internet so he could use an obnoxious amount of emoticons, but eventually he started work on something else: a subroutine with an accompanying music library, all of which he tagged with moods and descriptors (like "pensive, long" or "happy, short" or "triumph, moderate"). The subroutine determines appropriate moments for there to be bits of music, randomly picks from however many clips with tags match his mood and the conversational flow, and will play them in one of three ways: hummed in his "real" voice, played as a sound clip, or played with a different instrument (often 8-bit/chiptune, since it amuses him, but occasionally things like the piano or violin). He can do alternate instruments because the whole thing is at it's core based off of MIDI technology. A lot of his sound clips are taken from popular video games, too, so if you want to punch the fourth wall in the face a bit feel free to recognize something in particular! (If the word fanfare is involved there's a good chance it's the Final Fantasy fanfare, and he does a lot of Minecraft music too.)
So that is the why, and part of the how! How he actually produces sounds is via a speaker in the back of his throat and mouth, set up to be roughly analogous to human vocal chords. He normally sticks to the human method of speaking—playing the "ah" phoneme from a voicebank and shaping it into the actual words with his mouth—but he's capable of "pronouncing" the entire word through the speaker without involving his mouth at all. This also means that if he wants he can switch his voice over to like, a violin or something if he feels like it.
In short: someday I'm going to find an excuse to turn him into a tiny blue parakeet and it won't actually make a change to his vocal capabilities or habits at all. CHIRP CHIRP.
First off! Yuuichi is a robot! Specifically, he is a robot who was created to bridge the gap of understanding between humans and robots by being able to feel the way humans did! ...This actually initially failed completely— his father wasn't able to program a heart for him, and he wandered around emotionless for several years. THIS WAS FIXED LATER, but it was through Yuuichi's efforts, rather than his father's.
Anyway, the problem became that while Yuuichi had finally gotten himself a feel or two, he didn't have any way to express it. His father had programmed in facial expressions, but it turned out that in practice they still didn't look quite right and overall looked just off enough to creep most people out in the same way things like wax figures/creepy puppets do. While he could resort to really exaggerated body language instead, that plus his eternal lineface also came off kind of offputting. This lead to him getting misread frequently, because unless someone knew him extremely well they had no idea what he was feeling!
Solution? ...well initially it was keep all of his social interaction to the internet so he could use an obnoxious amount of emoticons, but eventually he started work on something else: a subroutine with an accompanying music library, all of which he tagged with moods and descriptors (like "pensive, long" or "happy, short" or "triumph, moderate"). The subroutine determines appropriate moments for there to be bits of music, randomly picks from however many clips with tags match his mood and the conversational flow, and will play them in one of three ways: hummed in his "real" voice, played as a sound clip, or played with a different instrument (often 8-bit/chiptune, since it amuses him, but occasionally things like the piano or violin). He can do alternate instruments because the whole thing is at it's core based off of MIDI technology. A lot of his sound clips are taken from popular video games, too, so if you want to punch the fourth wall in the face a bit feel free to recognize something in particular! (If the word fanfare is involved there's a good chance it's the Final Fantasy fanfare, and he does a lot of Minecraft music too.)
So that is the why, and part of the how! How he actually produces sounds is via a speaker in the back of his throat and mouth, set up to be roughly analogous to human vocal chords. He normally sticks to the human method of speaking—playing the "ah" phoneme from a voicebank and shaping it into the actual words with his mouth—but he's capable of "pronouncing" the entire word through the speaker without involving his mouth at all. This also means that if he wants he can switch his voice over to like, a violin or something if he feels like it.
In short: someday I'm going to find an excuse to turn him into a tiny blue parakeet and it won't actually make a change to his vocal capabilities or habits at all. CHIRP CHIRP.