Who is Hatsune Miku?

Meet Miku

There is something about Hatsune Miku that intrigues me. There is a mix of accessibility and bewildering strangeness that seems to emanate from her image. I wasn’t even sure what she (it?) was when I first saw her. It wasn’t until I saw her face on a Community Charity poster in a local school that I figured I should at least try and figure out what the deal is.

Hatsune Miku originally was the mascot for a music creation program created by Crypton Future Media. Her name is a play on the phrase 最初の音楽 (saisho no ongaku or “first music”) and the Japanese pronunciation of music (ミュージック/myuujiiku, which, shortened, is “miku,” though it also may be a play on the kanji for “future”). The selling point of Hatsune Miku music creation software is the “vocaloids” which allows the emulation of human singing. Not unlike how computers can read human speech, the program can sing with whatever speech that is inputted. It is like auto-tuning, but without the singer “middle-man.” Because of how the Japanese language is parsed out into syllables, it makes the program able to understand and output  any Japanese speech that a user inputs (unlike English, with its many letter combinations and different stresses depending on the meaning of the sentence, that can trip up any sort of computerized auto-reader, which makes any sort of English inputted into Hatsune Miku sounds more like Japanese than English).

The Original Music Creation Software box

Hatsune Miku became popular in Japan once people got their hands on the program and started posting their creations on the internet. Through video sharing sites such as Youtube and Nico Nico Douga (a Japanese video sharing site) and other avenues, people started sharing and linking to other songs using the program. As people starting making more and more, making both covers of popular songs and original creations, Hatsune Miku became a “star.”

“Star” being a relative term. Hatsune Miku was less of a person and was more of a mascot. Once she started becoming more and more popular though, she mutated from just being a symbol of the music vocaloids are involved in, to an actual character with likes and dislikes. As other vocaloids were released in other to give different tones of voices for both male and female singing, all those became characters as well. These characters were then defined by the type of songs they would sing, which would then lead to other songs. The instruments became characters and then the characters became instruments.

Characters/Instruments

This makes Hatsune Miku arguably the first true “post modern” artist. She has her own style, but it is completely defined by what her audience creates for her. There is already a backlash against musical artists relying more and more on technology, and Hatsune Miku can easily represent everything people hate about modern music. Creativity sacrificed for convenience. Where this doesn’t apply is the power Hatsune Miku gives creators. An international musical star like Lady Gaga or Beyoncé has millions of dollars and has to travel all over the world to be as popular as they are, but Hatsune Miku allows anybody with a computer and a internet connection to make music in the “diva” style and dabble in a genre that would be inaccessible to them otherwise.

The popularity can then translate to the various CDs, video games, and concerts that Hatsune Miku and her gang of vocaloids are involved with. For example, the popular Nyan Cat Youtube meme sensation was recently translated into a consumer product via the Vita/PS3 release of Hatsune Miku (which can be seen here). That game in particular is eager to show off both fan made and official art and music dedicated to Hatsune Miku. It is honestly tough to really tell which is the fan made stuff and what is the stuff created by professionals (granted, it was all edited by professionals, which is arguably the most important aspect of all).

Meet the Vocaloid Gang

The blurring of the line between what “professional” and “amateur” means is not just the domain of Hatsune Miku, but really of the internet in general. Though, Hatsune Miku does certainly represent maybe a more insidious side of “internet democracy.” You can create anything you want, but in order to get noticed, you will need to buy this program, and imprint your creation with this corporate mascot. This is not a necessarily uncommon practice in the Japanese pop culture space. There are various characters that indie creators on the internet will share in order to gain a following (another example being the Touhou Project, a Japanese indie shooter that has gone from a one man production to a media cornucopia), but this usually lead to these games not being released on any international scale because the rights management becomes muddled. Hatsune Miku is different because it is very clear that Hatsune Miku is owned by Crypton Future Media.

Professional/Amateur

So I guess the real question becomes, is the music any good? Well, if you happen to like Japanese pop music (especially music coming from pop idols), Hatsune Miku is incredibly similar (here is a sample). Much like Japanese pop acts, Hatsune Miku relies a lot on presentation and the image is a part of the appeal, but the output from many sources makes it so the music has many forms, and the vocaloids tie it all together. Then with the customization power given through-out the vocaloid catalog (especially in the video games), any sort of unappealing aspect can be tweaked. Don’t like the music video where two scantily clad women are dancing around, saying how much they like each other? Change it to two fully dressed men with rocket packs! The music itself can’t be changed as easily (without the original music program anyway), but one of the big appeals of the Hatsune Miku experience is how customizable it is.

It fact, customizability is most probably the reason why Hatsune Miku and the other vocaloids are so popular. You can dress her anyway you want, and participate in defining who she is. In the PS3/Vita game, you can even feed them (though this feels more like a stage manager job than any sort of wish fulfillment fantasy). They may not be real, but they can be more defined and accessible than the real life divas. In a way, Hatsune Miku is the true next evolution of Marilyn Monroe (which according to Gloria Stienem, was a “female impersonator,” which she meant in that every woman is a “female impersonator,”  how fitting then that the successor would then be impersonating humanity as well?). The vocaloids can be everything you could desire if you put in the time and effort to do so.

She's coming for ya'!

Whether or not this will ever appeal outside of Japan however, is yet to be seen.