Virtual Singer Uses Crowdsourced Songs To Become a Star In Japan (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg. [Alternate version here]: During her 10-year career, she's released more than 100,000 songs in a variety of languages and opened shows for Lady Gaga. And yet Hatsune Miku, who boasts 2.5 million Facebook followers, doesn't actually exist -- at least not in the typical way we think of a flesh-and-blood diva. Miku is a computer-simulated pop star created more than a decade ago by Hiroyuki Ito, CEO of Crypton Future Media in Sapporo, Japan.

She started life as a piece of voice-synthesis software but since has evolved to become a singing sensation in her own right -- thanks to the creativity of her legions of fans. Crucial to Miku's success is the ability for devotees to purchase the Yamaha-powered Vocaloid software and write their own songs for the star to sing right back at them. Fans then can upload songs to the web and vie for the honor of having her perform them at "live" gigs, in which the computer-animated Miku takes center stage, surrounded by human guitarists, drummers and pianists.
Bloomberg's article includes some video clips of the virtual artist -- as well as her real-world fans.

Comments

Re:Still.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Now, consider modern pop stars: who can only sing (not play any instruments), are singing songs written by someone else, and are having their vocals put through filters and auto-tune in production, and live out a personality in public groomed by their marketing agency."
Like say, Bing Crosby and Doris Day?
Do you know whom we can blame for this modern phenomenon that has lasted over a Century so far?
John Philip Fucking Sousa.

Sousa made quite a good living Composing, Arranging and Conducting, and significantly, selling Sheet Music. He loathed the Phonograph, especially Edison's version of it. He called it "Canned Music" because of the cylindrical shape of Edison's recordings. They cut into his Sheet Music sales.
Sousa also loathed Jazz, not only for the usual Racist reasons, but because he had no patience at all for any improvisation. Musicians should do only exactly as they are told. "Tonal hooch, the substitute for real music, beloved of apes, morons, half-wits, cake-eaters, professional pacifists, gold-diggers and other loiterers along the highway of life." He quite liked conducting Military Bands; as members of the Armed Forces, he didn't have to pay the musicians.
But if you can't beat them, join them. Sousa built a Business Empire base on the concept of total control. He owned the Rights to everything connected to him, even the later Film and Radio performances. He created the modern concept of The Producer, for whom everybody else worked. Before then, Producers were more like Impressarios, hired by Theaters to manage Productions on a singular or Seasonal basis, with no Intellectual or other Property Rights.
Sousa was largely responsible for the Tin Pan Alley model, and that awful organization of thieves called ASCAP.
So the next time you here about the latest Disney Pop Tart de Jour, remember that they are just fresh meat, soon to go bad, because the Sousa System demands it.

OK, for real Music lovers- Christine Schafer, Bach: "Sich Uben Im Lieben". Beautiful Woman, beautiful voice. The Video for this is impossible to find online; the ARTS Network has the only Rights to it. The Video is called "The Gallery Opening"; it is quite surreal as Schafer wanders around taking pictures of the Gallery attendees who are mouthing her singing. She uses a Mamiya 6 Rangefinder.
It was just on as I was writing this.

Re:Still.

[AmiMoJo]

Vocaloid technology was originally designed for backing vocals and harmonies. It wasn't very good at doing real lyrics in most languages, including Latin-descended languages like English.

However, Japanese has some unusual properties that meant Vocaloid could sing in Japanese surprisingly well. The most important of these is that Japanese is basically a string of unconnected and discreet sounds. In English the sound the characters make depends on the other characters in the word, for example the different 'c' sounds in "cat" and "choose". That doesn't happen in Japanese (with a couple of minor exceptions for certain local accents/dialects).

So for an English voice synth when you type in "example", it has to run through a complex system that converts it into the vocal sounds for that word, before it even starts to consider adding expression. In Japanese it just takes each character of "tatoeba" (ta, to, e, ba, they are single characters in Japanese) and plays back one of about 50 samples at the selected pitch. People actually play Japanese vocal synths in real-time on a keyboard.

Remember that this was a decade ago. Nowadays English vocal synthesis is a lot better and probably could do lead vocals on a song.

Anyway, I don't think any music producer would have used Vocaloid for lead vocals. It took indie artists doing it to prove that people would actually listen to them. Part of the attraction is that indie artists could suddenly add lyrics to their work without any recording equipment or singing ability, and part of it was that she ended up singing about memes and the true, honest feelings of the nerds producing those songs. It was more real than real singers.

Re:Still.

[stabiesoft]

To me one of the greatest ironies of today is on SNL, the singers lip sync for the most part and the actors doing skits sing live.