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

Miku shows why openness actually promotes art

[DJ Rubbie]

Unlike typical Japanese media enterprises that exert their draconian copyright laws to squash usage of IP (including what Americans consider to be "fair use"), the creative forces that started Hatsune Miku put her design as part of the Creative Commons, thus freeing her design to amateur and professional artists alike for reuse. As a result, the original rights holder receive even greater recognition for their voice synthesizer software line from the artists creating all the derivative visual works involving her likeness.

Well, it was only a matter of time

[grasshoppa]

Music companies have been manufacturing stars for years, this is really just the next step in the process.

A very very small step, truth be told.

Re:Well, it was only a matter of time

[AmiMoJo]

That's the thing about Hatsune Miku - she is a genuine grass roots effort, one of the least manufactured pop stars in Japan right now.

As TFA says, she started as a voice pack for the Vocaloid software synthesiser package. Fans used it to create songs and upload them to Nico Nico Douga, a site similar to YouTube. These were pure fan creations, the Vocaloid software was just the firm time that someone working from a PC at home could use high quality vocals without having to record them themselves.

As is often the case in Japan, other people started to supplement the popular songs with fan art and videos. In Japan it's common to have a mascot for your product, and since this was a female vocal synth they had already created Hatsne Miku with the intention of releasing other characters (voice packs) later.

Eventually independent record labels started collecting these songs and releasing them. Since the software is a just a synth like any other, the creators no more own the copyright than the creators of a drum synth or a real instrument would. As her popularity grew they started doing concerts and bigger CD releases, but most of the songs are still created by independent artists and posted for free online.

Re:Well, it was only a matter of time

[Nidi62]

You can't force this one to give you a blowjob, though. So that's a loss for the music executives in Japan's version of the RIAA.

Krieger has been working on that for a while though, and I think he's pretty close.

Re:Still.

[SeaFox]

Her vocals are based off samples of an actual person.

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.

How big is the difference really?

Re:Still.

[sheramil]

She isn't real.

I've seen videos of Hatsune Miku. I've heard sounds that give the impression that she can sing. You, you're just text on a screen.

Re:Still.

[sheramil]

"Tonal hooch, the substitute for real music, beloved of apes, morons, half-wits, cake-eaters..."

Hey! There's no call for that kind of language.

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.

[geekmux]

"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?

No, not like Bing Crosby or Doris Day. Stars of yesteryear actually had a recognized talent. A natural ability to sing anyone's songs.

We have mostly entertainers today, who are more valued for their porn star looks and ability to dance around on a stage. Many rely on lip-syncing and Autotune because they cannot actually sing. Society accepts this because they now value entertainment more than natural talent.

The rise of a virtual singer only clarifies just how far we've fallen. Regardless if Hatsune's vocals are based on a "real" person, it's still a manufactured product at best. I don't even call an Autotuned human voice authentic, because it's not.

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.