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Their Whistler Music Synthesizer is a descendant of VocalWriter which has been around for more than 5 years.

This is incorrect, VocalWriter has been around for a long time. There are probably others too.

Your argument is no more credible than the curmudgeons who said that an electric piano sounds so unlike a real piano that it's a total waste, and nobody would ever perform a legitimate creative work using one.

Think "new tools at an artist's disposal", and "dawn of a new type of digital instrument" instead.

Yeah, except that as others have already pointed out, this is far from the first vocal synthesizer. It's at best an incremental improvement over the previous successes.

Besides VocalWriter, which has been around since 1997 (and hasn't been updated in that time, unfortunately), I'm not aware of any other easy-to-use singing synthesizers that are aimed at the average user or even average musician. But just about every speech synthesizer out there has been hacked to sing, e.g. Apple's Macintalk or Festival's
Flinger.

Yamaha's Vocaloid might sound better than those, but it's not about to fool anyone paying attention. Nor is it likely to be used as a musical instrument the way other synthesizers are. Why? Because there's no way to dynamically control what it says the way you can dynamically control a keyboard synthesizer or any other musical instrument, whether acoustic or electronic.

Thus the only way it could be used is in a recording studio, where it would have to be programmed carefully to "sing" a particular song.

Sorry about the rant. I love new technology, I just hate it when people claim things are the first ever or revolutionary when they're really just incremental improvements.

This doesn't sound all that different from the old (and apparently defunct) Mac software VocalWriter. My wife uses it for almost all her music, not for the voices (which have the same unnatural qualities as this Yamaha thing), but for its easy composition interface and unique instruments (funky pitch-bent flutes and stuff).

What about VocalWriter for the Mac. Allegedly, "the world's first music synthesizer that can actually sing your lyrics", it's been around at least 5 years now ...

No not the first...

The Mac speech thing could be programmed to sing.. I remember doing it maybe 10 frickin' years ago! Just get it to talk asynchronously, and while the speech is running, change the pitch. Easy!

I know of at least VocalWriter which uses this technique and has been out since at least 2000.

Not the "first" by a long shot.

Shpongle (trance group) used Vocal Writer in their CD that was released in 1998.