Making o weka

March 14, 2025

As usual, a little bit of context, because this song is in toki pona: Toki Pona is a philosophical artistic constructed language created by Sonja Lang known for its small vocabulary, simplicity, and ease of acquisition.

Here’s the Youtube video:

This song is a cover of うわがき by いよわ. The original song was an alternative rock song released for the event YouTubeMusicWeekend 8.0. It is a deviation from いよわ’s usual style, but it does feature a pretty imaginative, though minimal-effort, music video. It also tells a somewhat nuanced story some people has talked extensively about, but I’m really not the kind of person who is into this type of loose GameTheory-like speculation.

⊕I started nasin pona lon telo ike with the title itself, nasin pona nasin pini with the repeating wawa, and Lord’s Prayer with o mama mi.

Much like other translations I have done before, this project started with a small nugget of experiment: “tawa pona a” as the first line. I decided to rhyme the entire thing, with more or less the same rhyme scheme as the original Japanese. This proved not to be too hard, apart from the bridge.

Starting the project in a DAW was pretty important. I had found out only when I started making a midi for the vocals that the majority of the song was not in standard tuning, but shifted down (or up, depending on the determined key) 50 cents, which is A=453. The second bridge is in standard tuning, and it goes back to shifted up half a semitone again for the final chorus. The middle, shifted part is clearly the purpose of this non-standard tuning, but it only makes covering the song more difficult that the majority of the song is de-tuned, instead of the minority.

OpenUTAU was used as always. For anyone who is just beginning to learn how to tune, embellishments and vibrato are the only two things that contribute to the “tuned” sound if you are just looking to churn something out. It’s certainly not worth it to fiddle with resamplers, complex dynamics, or anything more complicated for an experiment or something that is going to get a couple hundreds of views.

Some basic mixing was also definitely needed. Teto does need some EQ for almost any song, and a little reverb does even more good on UTAU vocals than real, human vocals. My version of the music video was a screen recording of a QEMU emulation of Fedora Core. I used nano (mostly because I didn’t bother to install vim) and the rm command to rehash the original idea.

As always, sitelen pona and toki pona lyrics are included in the video, alongside leaning-literal English translations and English commentaries on translation. I would like to automate the typesetting workflow someday, but I don’t make enough toki pona songs to warrant an automation project.

mi tawa.