There is…

General notes

• The methodology used
• The key (legend) to the notation used

Special notes

This is the first J-pop lyrics I transcribed, and is an appropriate place to explain its relationship with Cori’s lyrics: Basically, the two sets of transcriptions have nothing to do with each other, except that they come from the same original lyrics. Why I did my own transcription was this:

After finding Cori’s lyrics for There is…, I tried to sing to it. I couldn’t. Naturally, I began to suspect that Cori did not do the transcription correctly, so I began to try to do my own transcription. (See the methodology page.)

At the end, I crosschecked my results with Cori’s, and found two discrepancies. After further checking with the actual recording, I found that Cori did not make a single mistake; the reason why I couldn’t sing to her transcription is only because hitomi pronounced many words in strange ways:

• Omission of vowels—a particularly serious case being the three-syllable “shiteru” becoming the one-syllable “shter” (I would say this is the single biggest reason there’s no way anyone can sing to Cori’s transcription)
• Diphthongized adjoining vowels sung in the time of one vowel, even if the adjoining vowels are in different words—as in the “ai” in “chippoke-na ishi”
• Diphthongs “ei” and “ou” actually pronounced as their constituent vowels (something all textbooks say does not happen, but obviously this happened)—as in “shōdou”

So what you have now is a transcription that is virtually identical to Cori’s, but with hitomi’s actual pronunciations indicated. (See the key page.)