Hatsune Miku! Virtual Pop Star Who Blew Up in Japan

Hatsune Miku Live in Concert

A Hatsune Miku concert begins humanly enough. If you’ve ever had the heart to accompany a daughter or niece to, say, a Justin Bieber or Miley Cyrus extravaganza, you know the drill: The young crowd rushes in, giggling, making yelplike noises that adult throats don’t make, repeating the titles of songs as if they were mantras. The band emerges, followed by more young-throat noises, followed by the diminutive but eerily poised headliner, who recalls one of those grown-up-looking babies in Renaissance art. Followed by pubescent rapture.

At a Hatsune Miku concert, that’s also the moment when the proceedings take a turn for the, well, the only precise way of saying it is for the Japanese. Miku is not human. She is a virtual idol, a holographic star. Miku is crowdsourced, ever-evolving, famous software. Not even her fans know, or care, how to taxonomize her. (“She’s rather more like a goddess: She has human parts, but she transcends human limitations. She’s the great posthuman pop star,” one fansite reads.) Her bandmates are all actual people playing real instruments, but Miku is projected onto the stage, singing, if that’s the word, in avian-robot trills. She was programmed to do this months before, thousands of miles away.

Miku Hatsune Cosplay

Not that her forecoded unreality interferes with widespread adoration. On the contrary, Miku is now one of the biggest acts in Asia—as popular in her native Japan as Sega’s iconic Sonic the Hedgehog. She has devotees beyond Japan too. Last November she gave a concert in Singapore, drawing 3,000 fans—only about half of them female, not all young. They sang along in Japanese, a language many of them didn’t speak. Some came dressed as Miku. Others waved Miku dolls to the beat. One girl watched a Miku video on her phone while a digitized Miku played in front of her.

A young man holding a Miku figurine aloft like a votive offering said her songs are “very touching.” Another fan, Wei Qi, who was 15 and was wearing clip-on cat ears, pointed out that “it doesn’t take a human to sing a good song.”

Amy, a 13-year-old who’d come with a friend, was even more enthusiastic. The two fans were in full Miku regalia: blue wigs, gray sleeveless one-pieces, and blue clip-on ties. “It’s a good thing” Miku isn’t human, she said. “She’s not going to die. She’s not going to turn into Miley Cyrus, where she gets drunk or something.”

Amy first became interested in Miku after seeing concert footage online. She then submerged herself in Miku subculture, but she knew little about the star’s origins. This is just as Miku’s creators would have it.

Miku got her start as a marketing ploy. Nearly every corporation and organization in Japan has an anthropomorphized mascot, from the telecom giant NTT Docomo (Docomodake, a glum-faced mushroom) to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police (a flying mouselike creature called Pipo-kun). Miku was conceived as a mascot for Crypton Future Media, a maker of virtual instrument software, the stuff that facilitates the creation of the noise you hear in commercials and videogames but also, increasingly, much of the Top 40.

In 2007 Crypton’s CEO, Hiroyuki Itoh, was looking for a way to market a virtual voice program he’d developed using Yamaha’s Vocaloid 2 technology. Vocaloid’s first version had not sold well because, it was suggested to Itoh, it didn’t sound very lifelike. He disagreed. (Japan’s appetite for all things humanoid is insatiable, he knew, if properly plied.) What Vocaloid needed, Itoh believed, was an aidoru, an idol. So he engaged an illustrator of graphic novels in Tokyo who goes by the single name Kei. Itoh told Kei he wanted something cute but also slightly edgy, something that would attract creative young people to Vocaloid. Kei came back with a rendering of a 16-year-old girl who was 5’2″ and weighed 92 pounds. She had long, thin legs, coquettish bug-eyes, pigtailed blue locks that reached almost to the ground, and a computer module on her forearm. Her first name, Miku, meant “future”; her surname, Hatsune, “first sound.”

Source : http://www.wired.com