She has 1.8 million (and growing!) followers on Facebook - more than any other individual Japanese pop star or pop group. In the music world, too, Americans listen to plenty of artists whose persona and output have echoes of Vocaloid, from the rise of the future-Pygmalion “producer as artist” model of EDM superstars Zedd (who has collaborated with Miku), Skrillex, and Avicii, to the kind of synthetic anonymity favored by Daft Punk and Deadmau5.She has over 100,000 original songs under her name, some of which have been top karaoke picks in Japan for several years in a row.
But is it really? From magazine covers on which women are Photoshopped into porcelain-skinned cyborgs to CGI-crazed “live action” movies in which, say, Benedict Cumberbatch can transform into a dragon, we’re getting used to a certain kind of augmented reality. Sure, the whole post-human-pop-star thing sounds pretty weird to some people. It’s really exploding this idea of authenticity and the solo artist being the highest thing you can be.” “It’s not the Mick Jagger with this aura of originality.
“It’s totally counter the narrative of what artistic cultural production is right now,” she enthuses. Knight is exuberant when talking about this stuff, and it’s easy to see why: Miku is a media-studies professor’s dream-a wildly new model of pop stardom that’s both participatory and anti-hierarchical. For about $170, anyone with a personal computer could write a song using Meiko or Kaito’s voice. Then a Sapporo, Japan–based music-software company with a name straight out of a William Gibson novel, Crypton Future Media, had an idea: What if you could market Vocaloid to a mass audience? In 2004 it released its first Vocaloid voice-in-a-box: Meiko, a brunette pixie in a red pleather two-piece in 2006 came Kaito, a brooding, blue-haired misterioso in a long white trench.
#Hatsune miku human girl vocaloid hatsune miku human girl software#
Modern Vocaloid technology dates back to 2000, when development for commercial use began, although in its early days it was still a niche concern appealing only to music producers and software engineers. In 1962, Bell Labs’ IBM 704 became “ the first computer to sing” when it performed a very proto-Kraftwerk-sounding rendition of “Daisy Bell” (to which Stanley Kubrick paid chilling homage a few years later in 2001: A Space Odyssey). One fan-written history of Vocaloid explains: “Human voices are recorded in short samples, and these samples are stored in a database which becomes a software for songwriters and producers to use as an alternative a singing voice.” Cutting edge as it sounds, this technology is actually not that new. Miku is what’s known as a Vocaloid, an avatar of voice-synthesizing software (also called Vocaloid)-roughly, Siri–meets–GarageBand. Indeed, last month, shortly after she made her much-discussed American-network debut on The Late Show With David Letterman and shortly before her two headlining shows at the Hammerstein Ballroom, a New York Times headline wondered, “Does Hatsune Miku’s Ascent Mean the End of Music As We Know It?” (Don’t even think about calling her a cartoon.) She is, depending on whom you ask, a harbinger of a radically collaborative future in pop music or a holographic horsewoman of the apocalypse. But both of these are the kind of misnomers that are liable to send her legions of die-hard fans-and there are 2.5 million of them on Facebook-into cardiac arrest. If you’ve heard of her, you’ve probably heard her described as a “hologram” maybe you’ve also heard people say she doesn’t exist. She has opened for Lady Gaga, collaborated with Pharrell, and sung more than 100,000 songs, dabbling quite literally in every genre imaginable. She wears her cascading aquamarine hair in pigtails that skim the ground when she dances, and according to stats offered up on her record company’s website, she stands five-two and weighs about 93 pounds. Hatsune Miku, one of Japan’s most famous pop stars, has been 16 for the past seven years. This article originally appeared in Vulture.