A Sardine Grows from the Soil

Note: I've intentionally redacted the identity of the original creator throughout this blog post. While I can't stop anyone from looking them up, I would like to respect their boundaries. Thank you, [redacted].

I also mention some aspects of other renditions that I didn't particularly like. These are my personal preferences, and I only mention them to help explain the choices I made in my version. I won't be naming anyone specifically, and I'm not suggesting in any way that mine is better. This is simply my interpretation of the original work.

Prologue

It's hard to give a satisfying introduction to [redacted] for a few reasons:

• Most of the information about them is in Japanese, which I don't speak
• The information is scattered, fragmented, and hard to find
• I don't know all the relevant details myself
• I don't think it's what they would've wanted anyway

Regardless, I will say that [redacted]'s work has garnered an active and loyal fanbase, and it has inspired a lot of music in the same style.

I don't remember the exact details, but I discovered [redacted] through one of these homages. It had a cryptically short title with almost no context. It's nice to stumble across a small corner of the Internet like this.

I wanted to translate one of their songs, so I chose イワシがつちからはえてくるんだ (unofficially translated as "A Sardine Grows from the Soil"). It's from a 4-part series involving seafood, and it's much lighter in tone than the other entries.

I had no experience with translation or UTAU, but I gave it a shot anyway. I'm reasonably happy with the final result.

The Lyrics

This may be a disappointment, but I don't have any theories about the lyrics. All the surrealism is translated as-is, and I didn't add any deeper meaning to it.

Again, I don't speak Japanese, so I used other existing translations (and ChatGPT, sorry) as a starting point. You could argue that some of the Japanese wordplay might be lost without a proper understanding of the language, but as far as I'm aware, I'm pretty sure(?) this song doesn't have any.

I translated the lyrics on and off over a few weeks. Whenever I came up with a line that sounded good, I'd fill it in. I didn't translate the lines in sequential order or anything like that. Maybe it makes the lyrics less coherent, but I think it's kind of fitting for this song.

Since these lyrics were going to be sung, I knew they had to sound good musically. A lot of translations online have slightly awkward timing. For example, the stress might fall on the wrong syllable, or the rhythm doesn't quite match the original.

I think that's perfectly understandable. In fact, translating anything is already hard enough as it is. But for my version, I wanted our UTAU vocalist, Kasane Teto, to sound as close to her original Japanese version as much as possible.

Some of the lyrical features include, but are not limited to:

• The syllables of "timeline" are stretched to match the Japanese "タイムライン".
• The titular line "イワシがつちからはえてくるんだ" is translated less literally as "A sardine grows slowly from the soil underneath" to resemble the English title (more accurate would be something like "Sardines grow out of the earth").
• The "ah"s at the end of some chorus lines were added to phonetically sound like the Japanese "んだ".
• While I don't exactly know how rhyming works in Japanese, I felt it was important that the translated lyrics followed common English rhyming patterns.
• The original opening verse only mentions that "someone" had cut the timeline. My translation explicitly specifies that it was a "strange creature". No particular reason for this. It just felt right.
• I am somewhat proud of this translation: "いままでとこれからがつながって" → "Was it the future or will it be the past?"

Of course, there is more that could've been done. From the second repeat of the chorus onward, there's a hidden verse sung by the creator's UTAU voicebank. It's barely perceptible, but it's there. The lyrics reference クロマグロがとんでくる (The Bluefin Tuna Comes Flying), another one of their songs.

I ultimately decided not to translate this verse:

• The official(?) instrumental comes in two versions: one with both the choir and the hidden vocals, and one without either. So I'd either have to overlay hidden English vocals on top of the original Japanese vocals (not ideal), or I'd have to remove the choir entirely and remake their vocals (also not ideal).
• The creator's voicebank doesn't have an English version, so I'd either have to force it to sing broken (but intelligible) English, or use a different voicebank. Neither of these choices were great.
• There are very few translations online that actually translate this hidden verse. Most just leave it intact.
• Honestly, translating the main song was hard enough and I was getting lazy.

So in a way, this translation is incomplete. But, you know, exercise for the reader.

The Vocals

Originally I was gonna sing the vocals myself, but… no.

Now, I'm not a UTAU expert by any means, so forgive me if I say anything inaccurate.

I believe the creator's original UST is available, but for reasons I'll get to later, I wanted to remake it from scratch. I preferred doing that anyway.

The first thing to do was to create the MIDI file for the UST. I used FL Studio for this:

Next was actually making the UST in the UTAU software. Getting English voicebanks to work is a bit tricky, because, well, UTAU is fundamentally designed for Japanese voicebanks. I tried using the original UTAU app, but after enough headaches, I switched to OpenUTAU instead.

The better option for English Teto would've been SynthV anyway. But the creator also used UTAU, so that's what I used. I think SynthV would sound too realistic for this song, if anything. Also, SynthV costs money.

I'll be honest and say that I went into this focusing more on the lyrics themselves. I just played around with the parameters until I got something that sounded decent. English Teto is not perfect: some words had to be rendered creatively (for example, "duckboards" is actually her saying "daagh-boards"), but I managed to get it to work.

Apparently, I'm too much of a perfectionist, though. Looking at the old files, it seems like it took over 47 iterations to finally get it right. Actually, I was still unhappy with the vocals when I uploaded the cover (I remember her volume sounding a bit inconsistent).

What's more interesting is the vocal effects. Many covers have their own versions of them, but I wanted mine to stay true to the original.

The dramatic tremolo effect (the part where Teto is hitting her throat repeatedly) is achieved with a volume automation clip using a square(-ish) wave:

The vocal chops at the end are basically done as you'd expect, though I had to slow down the original to get the timing right:

Lastly, mixing was done by simply Googling utau vocal mixing tutorial. Sorry.

The Video

I could've just put my English translation on top of the original music video and called it a day. But I am a bit of a lunatic, and I wanted to remove the Japanese lyrics.

While the background behind the lyrics remains static for a good portion of the song, it starts moving near the end. I couldn't easily edit out the Japanese. So what to do?

Well, I could download the original(?) project files, and remove the lyrics directly. Here's the problem: the video was made in AviUtl, which is a pretty obscure video-editing software that's only available in Japanese (there's an English version, but it couldn't open the files).

No worries, I can use OCR and machine translation to (tediously) work out what each button does, and there's plenty of (Japanese) tutorials on AviUtl online.

The great thing about having the original project files is that you can render the video in a much higher resolution… and that's pretty much it. I wouldn't recommend using software in a foreign language. I'm not even sure where my edited files are anymore. They're probably gone because I accidentally deleted them somehow.

However, if you're planning on doing something like this (maybe for a different song), I'll say that it's definitely possible and it's worth the effort.

The short line in the description, "I'm not him", is a reference to another tribute artist.

Epilogue

Like I mentioned earlier, I was initially unhappy with the final result. In fact, I deleted and reuploaded it twice just to make minor changes. Looking at it now, these "flaws" feel pretty inconsequential.

The same thing happens whenever I create something new. Like, I'm writing this months after the video, and I don't really think this write-up is that good. I feel like I could've gone into more detail. But I think you just have to let go at some point.

The fact that this work was finished is already a big enough achievement for me. Who cares if it's not "perfect"? As long as I had a good time (and I did), I'm fine with that. I think too much sometimes.

To [redacted], thank you for making your wonderful songs.

I might make a properly original tribute song in the future. Who knows.

Sorry for the cheesy ending.