Does Nozawa have an understudy?

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Does Nozawa have an understudy?

Post by The Patrolman » Wed May 23, 2018 10:49 am

If she ever stops playing Goku I wonder if she ever had an secret understudy. I say this because when the late Yasuo Yamada (The voice actor for Lupin the 3rd) passed away, his will stated that Kanichi Kurita (a person who does a good impression of him) take over the mantle of the voice.
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Re: Does Nozawa have an understudy?

Post by BlueVegerot » Wed May 23, 2018 12:18 pm

I don't know about understudy but i'm sure toei/toriyama have possible replacements in mind

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Re: Does Nozawa have an understudy?

Post by gokaiblue » Wed May 23, 2018 4:55 pm

Someone is probably lined up to replace her should that be needed
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Re: Does Nozawa have an understudy?

Post by Dragon Ball Ireland » Wed May 23, 2018 5:59 pm

There's no way of knowing for sure, but I would imagine she does as TOEI will most likely want to continue making Dragon Ball as long as its popular and the series wouldn't sell as well without Goku.
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Re: Does Nozawa have an understudy?

Post by Chuquita » Wed May 23, 2018 7:03 pm

I'd be surprised if she didn't have a personally trained understudy. Nozawa even had her own voice acting studio at one point, didn't she? I thought she had experience teaching voice acting.
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Re: Does Nozawa have an understudy?

Post by One_Instance » Thu May 24, 2018 4:48 pm

I really do hope so. There are definitely impressionists out there and that gives me hope, but I have yet to hear one that can do all her different roles with their subtle differences. Even the example I provided isn't perfect and is mostly just used for comedic purposes.

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Re: Does Nozawa have an understudy?

Post by Yuli Ban » Fri May 25, 2018 12:58 am

I'd hate to say it, but I'm afraid she may not need one. I've not liked bringing this up around fans of works whose voice actors are as iconic as Mrs. Nozawa, but it's a fact that's going to have to be addressed sooner or later.

Voice acting as a career has maybe a decade and a half left of life in it, if that. And considering that many animated shows don't have high budgets to begin with and Japan is already thrifty as it is (IIRC the costs for an episode of an anime is a third of that of an American cartoon?), VAs for them are probably not going to survive the end of the 2020s.
So whatever understudy Mrs. Nozawa may have probably shouldn't expect a very long career unless Toei is a stickler for traditional ways (which I'm not all that sure about).

For those who are confused as to what I'm babbling about, you can start here: https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaSynthesis/

And if you don't want to browse through it, then here's some shortcuts:

DeepMind's WaveNet Text-To-Speech Algorithm | A major step forward in text-to-speech and speech generation/replication
Lyrebird claims it can recreate any voice using just one minute of sample audio
Baidu's voice cloning AI adds gender swapping and accent removal
Google Duplex A.I. - A Much Deeper Look! | Utilizing the latest in machine learning, this conversational AI has all but beaten the Turing Test by intelligently generating both voices and responses

TL;DR: Machine learning can replicate human voices. Not only that, but it can replicate any voice within a minute and it can do so to such a disturbingly realistic level that some people now have trouble telling the difference between a human voice and a synthesized one. This is all happening at an accelerated rate— we could not have predicted such extreme progress even two years ago, and it's still progressing forward faster than we may be comfortable with knowing. If you told me in 2016 that voice actors may be out of a job en masse by 2028 thanks to AI, even I would have said that was foolishly optimistic because surely computers can't hit the right subtle intonations, cadences, timbres, etc. Now I know better and, considering how few people are also following this, I dread the day it slams into our reality because we are going to have a societal-wide nervous breakdown.
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Re: Does Nozawa have an understudy?

Post by Dr. Casey » Fri May 25, 2018 6:25 pm

Good to see you here, Yuli.
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Re: Does Nozawa have an understudy?

Post by Yuli Ban » Fri May 25, 2018 6:30 pm

Dr. Casey wrote:Good to see you here, Yuli.
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Re: Does Nozawa have an understudy?

Post by batistabus » Fri May 25, 2018 7:06 pm

I can't find the interview, but I know that while Battle of Gods was in production, Toei interviewed several voice actors to replace Nozawa. When they approached Toriyama with the candidates, he said something along the lines of "What do you mean? Use Nozawa-san." Thankfully, it seems that Nozawa will voice Goku for the rest of her days. After that, Toei already appears has some people in mind. I have no idea if their intention is to mimic the sound of Nozawa's voice or not.

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Re: Does Nozawa have an understudy?

Post by AgitoZ » Fri May 25, 2018 8:40 pm

I hear Nozawa is training some little brown kid from who knows where to take up the mantle.
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Re: Does Nozawa have an understudy?

Post by Fionordequester » Fri May 25, 2018 8:54 pm

Yuli Ban wrote:TL;DR: Machine learning can replicate human voices. Not only that, but it can replicate any voice within a minute and it can do so to such a disturbingly realistic level that some people now have trouble telling the difference between a human voice and a synthesized one. This is all happening at an accelerated rate— we could not have predicted such extreme progress even two years ago, and it's still progressing forward faster than we may be comfortable with knowing. If you told me in 2016 that voice actors may be out of a job en masse by 2028 thanks to AI, even I would have said that was foolishly optimistic because surely computers can't hit the right subtle intonations, cadences, timbres, etc. Now I know better and, considering how few people are also following this, I dread the day it slams into our reality because we are going to have a societal-wide nervous breakdown.
But I mean...how is a machine ever going to replicate the personality a voice actor brings into their role? It doesn't matter how well they can mimic a real person, there's still going to be a degree of spontaneity in an actor's work that I can't see a machine ever replicating. It might be the little adjustments they make to the voice itself (like how Sabat's Vegeta changed drastically over the years), it might be the vocal tics they play around with at times, it might be them emphasizing a line in a way nobody expected...I just don't see how a machine's going to do that.

Unless, of course, the relevant machinists are literally willing to go frame-by-frame, tuning the "deliveries" to the exact right specifications for each and every line? Which...I guess they could do, but, it sounds like it would be a pretty tedious process.
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Re: Does Nozawa have an understudy?

Post by Robo4900 » Fri May 25, 2018 9:02 pm

Fionordequester wrote:
Yuli Ban wrote:TL;DR: Machine learning can replicate human voices. Not only that, but it can replicate any voice within a minute and it can do so to such a disturbingly realistic level that some people now have trouble telling the difference between a human voice and a synthesized one. This is all happening at an accelerated rate— we could not have predicted such extreme progress even two years ago, and it's still progressing forward faster than we may be comfortable with knowing. If you told me in 2016 that voice actors may be out of a job en masse by 2028 thanks to AI, even I would have said that was foolishly optimistic because surely computers can't hit the right subtle intonations, cadences, timbres, etc. Now I know better and, considering how few people are also following this, I dread the day it slams into our reality because we are going to have a societal-wide nervous breakdown.
But I mean...how is a machine ever going to replicate the personality a voice actor brings into their role? It doesn't matter how well they can mimic a real person, there's still going to be a degree of spontaneity in an actor's work that I can't see a machine ever replicating. It might be the little adjustments they make to the voice itself (like how Sabat's Vegeta changed drastically over the years), it might be the vocal tics they play around with at times, it might be them emphasizing a line in a way nobody expected...I just don't see how a machine's going to do that.

Unless, of course, the relevant machinists are literally willing to go frame-by-frame, tuning the "deliveries" to the exact right specifications for each and every line? Which...I guess they could do, but, it sounds like it would be a pretty tedious process.
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I can imagine a machine filling in for pickup lines and such, but I could never imagine a machine voice actually replacing a real actor. It's as you say, the human spontaneity can't be replicated; no machine could ever improvise like Robin Willliams, or get the wild, unexpected, mad inflections Mark Hamill brings to the Joker... It's what every voice actor always says -- doing voices is about 30% of it, the remaining 70% is the acting, the performance, the choices the actor makes about their inflections, the tone, etc...
Even if you can control every aspect of the machine's output, and make it totally capable of 100% of what any human voice could ever produce, it won't hold a candle to having actual actors and actual directors/engineers standing in a studio, working through a scene. Especially for shows like Rick And Morty, where they basically spend hours on end improvising and trying new things until they get every joke just right.

Plus, I'm sure unions would get involved, and prevent it from getting out of hand, even if studios did try to do this... And the technology would probably be far more expensive to license than it would be to hire an actor...
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Re: Does Nozawa have an understudy?

Post by Yuli Ban » Sat May 26, 2018 9:19 pm

The sad thing is, I can no longer agree. While AI for the next ten years or so will be inferior to human actors, it is proving increasingly unlikely that they won't eventually surpass us in terms of acting capability and versatility. The same spontaneity that we claim is unique to humans? We said that intuition is unique to humans and that's why we're superior to machines at Go. Then AlphaGo came along and obliterated Lee Sedol two years ago, playing so supremely well that it made a move never before seen in Go canon.

As to the cost problem, that simply isn't a problem. You can use these high-end voice synthesizers right now on GitHub for free. You can use a lot of these algorithms for free right now on your own computer so long as you have enough data to feed into them. And that's the point I'm trying to make: in a market economy, art for art's sake is only going to happen if it can also turn a profit. That's why "the original was the best" and "the book was better" are things. When adapting something, you have to make marketable changes. Hell, Dragon Ball itself is like that— the anime is greatly toned down from the manga because the censors wouldn't have let that fly for a children's program, even in the 80s. And it remains true for a lot of manga where more esoteric and challenging things happen in print than are shown in anime. Same thing with books. And even when something starts, when it continues it often only keeps changes to what's the most profitable/recognizable. Again: look at Dragon Ball. Why didn't Goten and Trunks age? We can argue all day that it's because of Saiyan genetics and a lack of stress in childhood, but the cold fact is that it was because that was their most recognizable and marketable look.

Same economics work here: if it's cheaper to use machines than real actors, studios will use machines. And so far, there's quite a lot of evidence that the upfront cost for using these voice synthesizers will start at "free". Art for art's sake can go either way, and there will always be art for art's sake made. You just can't expect that to sustain the world economy. In Dragon Ball's case, I wouldn't be surprised if it was one of the first anime to utilize machine voice synthesis acting once Mrs. Nozawa passes.
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Re: Does Nozawa have an understudy?

Post by Ringworm128 » Sat May 26, 2018 10:03 pm

Yuli Ban wrote:I'd hate to say it, but I'm afraid she may not need one. I've not liked bringing this up around fans of works whose voice actors are as iconic as Mrs. Nozawa, but it's a fact that's going to have to be addressed sooner or later.

Voice acting as a career has maybe a decade and a half left of life in it, if that. And considering that many animated shows don't have high budgets to begin with and Japan is already thrifty as it is (IIRC the costs for an episode of an anime is a third of that of an American cartoon?), VAs for them are probably not going to survive the end of the 2020s.
So whatever understudy Mrs. Nozawa may have probably shouldn't expect a very long career unless Toei is a stickler for traditional ways (which I'm not all that sure about).

For those who are confused as to what I'm babbling about, you can start here: https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaSynthesis/

And if you don't want to browse through it, then here's some shortcuts:

DeepMind's WaveNet Text-To-Speech Algorithm | A major step forward in text-to-speech and speech generation/replication
Lyrebird claims it can recreate any voice using just one minute of sample audio
Baidu's voice cloning AI adds gender swapping and accent removal
Google Duplex A.I. - A Much Deeper Look! | Utilizing the latest in machine learning, this conversational AI has all but beaten the Turing Test by intelligently generating both voices and responses

TL;DR: Machine learning can replicate human voices. Not only that, but it can replicate any voice within a minute and it can do so to such a disturbingly realistic level that some people now have trouble telling the difference between a human voice and a synthesized one. This is all happening at an accelerated rate— we could not have predicted such extreme progress even two years ago, and it's still progressing forward faster than we may be comfortable with knowing. If you told me in 2016 that voice actors may be out of a job en masse by 2028 thanks to AI, even I would have said that was foolishly optimistic because surely computers can't hit the right subtle intonations, cadences, timbres, etc. Now I know better and, considering how few people are also following this, I dread the day it slams into our reality because we are going to have a societal-wide nervous breakdown.
Synthetic actors still have a long way to go; just look at Rouge One; they spent a gargantuan amount of time, money and effort to create a (still obviously fake) digital version of Peter Cushing that only appeared in like three scenes. Toei is not going to put that sort of effort into a kids cartoon when they can just hire a human that requires no programming. And that's assuming they could even create a performance that doesn't strike right into the uncanny valley.

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Re: Does Nozawa have an understudy?

Post by Yuli Ban » Sat May 26, 2018 10:26 pm

That's just it, though. The fact Rogue One's synthetic material looked so bad and yet we're already getting to a point where we're freaking out these things is more or less a sign of how fast things are progressing. Case in point: Since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.5 month-doubling time (by comparison, Moore’s Law had an 18-month doubling period). Since 2012, this metric has grown by more than 300,000x.
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Re: Does Nozawa have an understudy?

Post by Ringworm128 » Sat May 26, 2018 10:57 pm

But it's still a long way off. The only reason they went with CGI Cushing is because Peter Cushing is just one of those people no one looks like. If they could have just hired a look a like they would have. And even then, Star Wars is a multi-billion dollar franchise; DB is not going to get that sort of treatment. This stuff takes effort. If you've ever used Vocaloid/UTAU you would know programming voices to sound even slightly human is more effort than any company is going to be bothered with in the next 5 decades.
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Re: Does Nozawa have an understudy?

Post by Dr. Casey » Sat May 26, 2018 11:02 pm

ringworm128 wrote:If you've ever used Vocaloid/UTAU you would know programming voices to sound even slightly human is more effort than any company is going to be bothered with in the next 5 decades.
That's... there's a lot wrong with this post, but going into this is beyond the scope of the topic or the forums. This discussion's probably a waste given everyone besides Yuli's complete lack of knowledge on the subject (not to sound rude, just being bluntly honest - as someone who's been keeping up with technology daily and borderline obsessively for about seven years now, there's a lot of truth to what Yuli says). Should probably get back to the original point of the thread.
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Re: Does Nozawa have an understudy?

Post by Cure Dragon 255 » Sun May 27, 2018 4:55 am

What is wrong with the post? Now that you have as you have said, been sorta rude, you better start explaining.
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Re: Does Nozawa have an understudy?

Post by Dr. Casey » Sun May 27, 2018 5:21 am

Vocaloid isn't exactly top-of-the-line technology nor is it related to the technologies that Yuli is referring to, and AI's come an incredibly long way since Deep Learning kicked off in 2012. To say that it will take 50 years for the technology to be usable is a statement that - again, not trying to be offensive - could only come from someone who doesn't actually know anything about the subject being discussed, and more than likely didn't look at the links that Yuli posted that go into the state of the technology right now and what has been accomplished already. This came out of nowhere and is leagues more advanced than anything that was available just last year, saying that this is a slow field that will take 50 years to get anywhere is just... not backed up by anything in reality.
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