#just dont expect the answer to be comprehensible 👍

[bugbbear]

i made a uquiz, btw

[mekatrio]

my personal lyrical.. analysis? interpretation? of Song of the Eared Robot

aka the most romantic song ever about a microphone...... (kinda)

ok. so art is subjective etc etc etc BUT i do very much believe that this song is about. well. an Eared Robot................. but Literally. now what is an eared robot. what part of a robot, machine, or computer, could be considered it's 'ears'. which mechanical instrument can 'hear'.... the Microphone🎤. the microphone is the instrument that receives and processes audio input.

this song may simply be about a microphone.. or maybe its about a fictional robot of the future that can understand human speech. it may even be a meta look into utauloid. that is up to personal interpretation. but i do believe it is a lot more literal than one may expect, bc a lot of terminology in the lyrics doesnt regard the most well-known topics.. so i will break down the terms and possible metaphors relating to audio/language processing technology. 👍

also, this interpretation uses my own personal translation for this song. not a native japanese speaker etc etc etc, but more importantly, japanese languages doesnt use pronouns the way that english does. which means that the 'subject'(person) is not clearly denoted, and when translating, it's up to personal understanding of the context (and when it comes to something like song lyrics, context tends to be scarce).

so for example, something like 綴れ in the 6th verse, literally just means to write / to spell out / to weave / to compose, etc. i personally chose to interpret it as "you write", but "I write" is also a valid translation, bc neither case is specified.

(and yeahh i couldve gone all the way literal and omitted pronouns as much as i could, but thats hardly comprehensible in english, and translation is a balancing act and an artform where it shouldnt just be a bare bones literal translation etc etc YEAHHHhhhh.....)

the pronouns i ended up choosing were done so to paint a narrative between the 'Eared Robot' and 'Another Person'. who the other person is (a scientist? a music producer using utau/vocaloid? something else?) is up to personal interpretation.. ill be skipping over the lines that dont relate to audio/language processing technology, bc those lines are beautiful lyrics that can hold different meanings for different ppl, and i dont feel the need to assert my own personal interpretation over those lines. 👍

ok. ONTO THE INTERPRETATION ANALYSIS THING

nothing to comment abt here ^^

phonemes = base sounds that build up a language. like the 'ah' in english 'cat', 'awl' in english 'ball'. rly simplified explanation but yeah.. im not a linguistic student. anyways this possibly relates to utauloid, bc utauloid requires you to link up the phonemes in order to create individual words (the given meanings), like so:

(and i think this is more of a utauloid thing than an vocaloid thing, bc according to this one quora answer:

also Song of the Eared Robot is sung by an utau, it makes more sense to imagine an utau singing about utauloid, etc..)

anyways. this lyric is essentially the 'robot' being given information to recognize Words

this is a rly cheeky and good lyric once the context is understood.... ok. so this lyric is referencing the Hidden Markov Model. to really, Really simplify what HMM is and it's relation to speech recognition programs And vocal synthesis programs (vocaloid/utauloid): HMM is an algorithm that sorts and processes recorded audio input by calculating statistic probability... an example being a program receiving audio data, then calculating the most likely phoneme that audio data could be.

and so this line cleverly references the function of HMM:

隠された　マルコフの = literally; Hidden Markov's

最尤の名の下に / And it's with near certainty where these 名 (word, sounds, titles) are = referring to HMM's statistic probability sorting properties

the last line of the chorus;

泣きたくなっても　まだ　N　を増やせ

Even when you want to cry, increase the amount of N

probably relates to HMM as well, bc um. well. i dont really get it but theres a thing called 'n-dimensional real-valued vectors' used in HMM for speech recognition applications.... passage from wikipedia:

this is specifically for speech recognition applications tho. so for the 'Eared Robot' to process and recognize speech... yup.

prosodies = the patterns of stress and intonation in a language

the last bit about meaning being there, but not the words, relates to paralanguage, a concept that comes up in another verse. will elaborate on that in a bit..

just keep in my mind that this verse is essentially saying: 'the intonation, the rhythm of the words, and the intended meanings are here, but it doesn't have any words?'

F0, or more properly, f₀, refers to fundamental frequencies. the fundamental frequency of a soundwave is what defines the pitch of a sound. 'Up and down' referring to the way sound waves travel:

meanwhile catathesis is a linguistic concept.. something about the sequence of high and low tones. heres the wikipedia article bout it

transmitted waves.. relating again to sound waves. now... paralanguage time. a great definition from this site:

essentially the aspect of communication that doesnt need words.... having meaning without the words..... relating to the earlier verse B)

in this verse, the 'Eared Robot' is able to find the meanings without the words, the intent behind the wordless prosodies (the rhythm, the rhymes, the intonation, etc)

nothing to comment about here again 👍👍

last bit of analysis.... 'Draw a circle, and paint the inside red'. for a long time, i had wondered what this line couldve meant. but after recontextualizing the song through the idea of language/audio processing technology.... i know what the answer is now (to myself at least) :

the red light indicating a recording 😊❤️❤️❤️

and the rest is the last few beautiful lyrics.. yayyy!!

one more thing to note tho. 恋をして (I've fallen in love) in the choruses is one of the most intimate way to express love in japanese. expressing love in the japanese language is its whole other thing... but yeah its very Very intimate.

anyways... beautiful beautiful song. my favorite song ever 😊😊😊and i said id avoid personal interpretations but idc i can add one of my own.. i think the chorus of 'falling in love and having that love discarded' is that the robot/machine falls in love every time something is recorded, everytime it 'hears' something, and the 'crumpled love' is trashed recordings, recordings that are never published/completed, etc. <3

also if anyone actually reads my autism fueled ramblings... u should watch To Become Vocaloid by Junferno. great video that goes into this topic more in depth and very funnily