Vocaloid fans were ecstatic to find virtual pop idol Hatsune Miku listed on this year’s Coachella lineup. For those who don’t know what Coachella is, it is an annual music and arts festival held in the Coachella valley in the Colorado Desert. As for Hatsune Miku, the explanation is a bit more complicated.
In 2002, an audio-media company called Crypton Future Media partnered with music software company Yamaha to create a singing vocal synthesizer software, which they titled “Vocaloid,” a portmanteau of “vocal” and “android.” Their first two Vocaloids, named KAITO (pronounced “kite-oh”) and MEIKO (“may-ko”), were voiced by Japanese voice actors Naoto Fuuga and Meiko Haigou, respectively. Their third Vocaloid, Hatsune Miku (“hot-sue-neigh mee-coo”), was voiced by Saki Fujita, followed by Kagamine (“kah-gah-mee-nay”) Rin and Len (voiced by Asami Shimoda) and Megurine (“meh-goo-ree-neigh”) Luka (voiced by Yu Asakawa). These five Vocaloids are the most popular of the approximately 86 publicly released Vocaloids that sing in a variety of languages from Spanish to Chinese, but Hatsune Miku is the most well-known/popular of them all due to her iconic appearance and voice.
Miku’s voice has been used in over 100,000 user-generated songs, and her influence has spread from music to video games (such as SEGA’s “Project Diva” series) to animation (such as MikuMikuDance, a 3D animation software), and even to pizza marketing (Domino’s Pizza Japan, specifically, which had a promotion using special boxes and an AR app to project Miku’s dancing onto Domino’s pizza boxes). Her voice has been used to sing the ending themes of “Akikan” and “Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories”, and she appeared as her own character (with her vocals used to create realistic speech) in “Shinkansen Henki Robo Shinkalian the Animation”. She has also had several tours, such as “Hatsune Miku Live Party”, “Hatsune Miku Magical Mirai”, and “Miku Symphony”, and Coachella is only one stop on her yearly tour, titled Miku Expo. Miku Expo started in Europe on January 11, and will continue in the US in April. She has also had a few live mainstream performances, like when she opened for Lady Gaga at her ARTPOP Ball and performed on The Late Show with David Letterman in 2014.
Head spinning yet? Let me explain how a live Hatsune Miku performance works. Miku’s vocals are pre-rendered using the Vocaloid software, and her outfit, model, and dance are made using 3D animation software. At the concert venue, Miku is projected onto a special screen, usually made out of curved frosted glass, so that it looks like there is an actual person dancing on the stage. (This is why some journalists have incorrectly called Miku a “hologram”.) Her singing is then accompanied with a live instrumental performance. That’s right, the guitars, drums, and keyboards you hear at a Miku concert are all played by real people who have to play exactly at the proper tempo to be on time with Miku’s singing. For “Miku Symphony”, the process is even more complicated, because there is both a full orchestra and occasionally a children’s choir performing while Miku appears on a projector screen above them.
So, now that I’ve explained way too much about Vocaloid, why should you care that Miku is singing at Coachella? Well, she’s the first virtual performer to appear at Coachella that doesn’t technically exist. Coachella brought a projection of Tupac to the stage in 2012, and the virtual characters of the band Gorillaz performed there in 2010. However, Miku’s setlist is different, in that rather than her songs being written by a single band, her songs have all been written by different “producers” with names like Giga-P, wowaka, ryo, Kikuo, and Neru. Each of her songs will be a different style, have her voice edited differently, and come with its own meaning to the Vocaloid community.
Not only will Miku’s performance at Coachella bring new fans to Coachella, it could also bring new Coachella fans to Miku. Bringing the growing Vocaloid community more and more into the public eye means one day we might see more Vocaloid performances in the US, and maybe it will show the West that vocal synth software is something to care about.
Header image: Hatsune Miku in “News 39” by Mitchie M. Image courtesy of Mitchie M and YouTube.
Categories: Opinion
Leave a Reply