Yamaha Sets Up Teaser Site for New VOCALOID3 Library “ZOLA PROJECT”

Yamaha has announced on their website the opening of a teaser site for their upcoming VOCALOID3 library titled “ZOLA PROJECT”. This library is being developed in commemoration of the 10th year anniversary of Yamaha’s announcement of VOCALOID and may be the “multi-singer” library announced by Kenmochi during an episode of Dream Creator. The teaser website currently consists of a logo with what appears to be the kanji 宙 with dakuten attached, as well as the words “ZOLA PROJECT”. A possible reading of 宙 happens to be “sora” and the dakuten converts it into “zora”. A footnote explains that ZOLA is an acronym of “Zenithal Operated Liaison Aggregation”, with the latter two words supporting the idea that this is a voice bank involving multiple voices singing together. The “Zenithal” along with the kanji seems to indicate some sort of relationship to the sky or things high above. The news bulletin from Yamaha indicates that more information will be published in an upcoming issue of “VOCALOID wo Tanoshimou” (Let’s Enjoy VOCALOID), which comes out on March 11.


8 thoughts on “Yamaha Sets Up Teaser Site for New VOCALOID3 Library “ZOLA PROJECT””

  1. Good eye to have found 宙 as a reading, damn calligraphy. However one question, where did you get this reading of sora ? My dictionary only provides chuu, even when the kanji is used alone, seems there’s only a On reading.
    Anyway Creative use of the dakuten 🙂 I wasn’t aware that one could stick them to a kanji like that. Maybe you should link dakuten to the wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakuten) or give an exemple (like そ->so ぞ->zo), I’m not sure most of the readership is fluent enough in Japanese to know what a dakuten is.

    1. LOL reading 宙 off that was elementary.
      I don’t know much about this but google 宙 and sora/sola appears on the first page

    2. A dakuten is just the symbol that changes to pronunciation of a symbol in Japanese. like ふ to ぷ isn’t like elementary school level learning of japanese? But yeah I even looked 宙 up on Denshi and it seems to be translated to just space; air; or midai like what you got. Though it did provide some other uses of it that have stuff to do with space usually. Still I can’t really judge it until I get more info on it though so far it just sounds like either a chorus style bank or plug in.

  2. Mulptiple voices?, ok, that’s sounds original. But I don’t get the point of it.
    We’ll have to wait, I don’t like when they announce something only giving us the name of it! -.-
    And I really hope some male voice to be in it!

    1. For Vocaloid yes, For voice synthesizers in general no. East west already did something similar to this with their symphonic choirs and using the word builder engine.

  3. Ahaha, the first thing that popped up in my head when I heard ZOLA (I first heard this on Tumblr) was LOLA, and assumed that something like a group Engloid band or something was in production. 😛 ((Of course, I was completely wrong, aha))
    But this sounds really interesting! o3o I’m guessing it’ll be slightly easier to compose duets, now?

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