For about $170, anyone with a personal computer could write a song using Meiko or Kaito’s voice. Then a Sapporo, Japan–based music-software company with a name straight out of a William Gibson novel, Crypton Future Media, had an idea: What if you could market Vocaloid to a mass audience? In 2004 it released its first Vocaloid voice-in-a-box: Meiko, a brunette pixie in a red pleather two-piece in 2006 came Kaito, a brooding, blue-haired misterioso in a long white trench. Modern Vocaloid technology dates back to 2000, when development for commercial use began, although in its early days it was still a niche concern appealing only to music producers and software engineers. In 1962, Bell Labs’ IBM 704 became “ the first computer to sing” when it performed a very proto-Kraftwerk-sounding rendition of “Daisy Bell” (to which Stanley Kubrick paid chilling homage a few years later in 2001: A Space Odyssey). One fan-written history of Vocaloid explains: “Human voices are recorded in short samples, and these samples are stored in a database which becomes a software for songwriters and producers to use as an alternative a singing voice.” Cutting edge as it sounds, this technology is actually not that new. Miku is what’s known as a Vocaloid, an avatar of voice-synthesizing software (also called Vocaloid) - roughly, Siri–meets–GarageBand.
Indeed, last month, shortly after she made her much-discussed American-network debut on The Late Show With David Letterman and shortly before her two headlining shows at the Hammerstein Ballroom, a New York Times headline wondered, “Does Hatsune Miku’s Ascent Mean the End of Music As We Know It?” (Don’t even think about calling her a cartoon.) She is, depending on whom you ask, a harbinger of a radically collaborative future in pop music or a holographic horsewoman of the apocalypse. But both of these are the kind of misnomers that are liable to send her legions of die-hard fans - and there are 2.5 million of them on Facebook - into cardiac arrest. If you’ve heard of her, you’ve probably heard her described as a “hologram” maybe you’ve also heard people say she doesn’t exist.
She has opened for Lady Gaga, collaborated with Pharrell, and sung more than 100,000 songs, dabbling quite literally in every genre imaginable. She wears her cascading aquamarine hair in pigtails that skim the ground when she dances, and according to stats offered up on her record company’s website, she stands five-two and weighs about 93 pounds. Hatsune Miku, one of Japan’s most famous pop stars, has been 16 for the past seven years.
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