Miku – Japan’s latest pop star
The Japanese are well known for their eccentric musical tastes – they turned the Cheeky Girls into a success story after all – but their latest pop sensation is probably the most oddball of them all. Her name is Hatsune Miku, and as well as having a number one best-selling album, she has also been packing out concert venues all summer. However, despite her success, Miku won’t be signing autographs, performing TV interviews or hugging fans any time soon. While this might be considered typical behaviour for a pop diva, Miku has a very different reason for her lack of fan interaction– she’s only a hologram.
Developed by Japanese firm Crypton Future Media, Miku was initially created to give a face to a computerised singing synthesizer application. The program utilises Yahama’s Vocaloid technology, which basically ‘sings’ any song created by the user. After lyrics and a melody are typed into the computer, the Vocaloid program is able to sing it back, allowing anyone to create a pop hit.
After developing the character’s appearance, the voice of Miku Hatsune was created by recording vocal samples from well-known Japanese voice actress, Saki Fujita. Every sample contains a solitary Japanese phonic recorded at a controlled pitch and tone, which are then strung together by the Vocaloid synthesizer to form complete words and phrases at the user’s command. Once lyrics have been composed, the pitch of each sample is altered by the synthesizer in accordance with the melody constructed by the user, which creates the finished ‘song’.
Despite being one of many vocal synthesizer applications on the market, Miku is undoubtedly the most popular, which made an assault on the Japanese pop charts almost inevitable. Miku artwork has been emblazoned on three different Super GT racing teams, and the character has also appeared in a number of recent anime projects. Nico Nico Douga, Japan’s answer to YouTube, has been inundated with uploads of various user-created Miku songs, paving the way for an official chart release.
Miku made her first ‘live’ concert appearance in August 2009, and has been appearing at venues across Japan during a summer tour this year. Miku appears onstage as a hologram, in a manner similar to live performances by animated band The Gorillaz. But whereas Damon Albarn’s creations were projected onto a back screen, Miku is rendered at the front of the stage, seemingly in three dimensions. The truth behind the spell-binding holographic Miku is a matter of some debate in Japan – does she appear as a dynamic 3D hologram, or is she simply projected onto a transparent screen? Whatever the answer, it doesn’t seem to matter much to Miku’s fans, as her concerts continue to sell out across the country. It remains to be seen whether Miku’s popularity will spread to foreign shores, or confine itself to an island nation well known for its strange fads and fashions. Even so, it’s unlikely that the worldwide pop scene will see a star as odd as Miku for some time to come – even in Japan!
