Japan's Latest Rockstar Is a 3D Hologram 305
kkleiner writes "Hatsune Miku is a Japanese pop diva who's just started to play massive stadium concerts to sold out crowds. Her hair is blue, she dresses like Sailor Moon, and she'll only appear in concerts via a 3D 'hologram.' Oh, and did I forget to mention that she's completely fictional? Created by Crypton Future Media, Hatsune Miku and her virtual colleagues have gone on limited tours in Japan."
Stadium Concerts to Sold Out Crowds? (Score:4, Interesting)
Really? What stadium?
I mean just a little reality check here. ... that would be "I heard of her" not "oh my god she's so popular..ponies..". Sheesh.
1. "She" isn't, and has never been in any of the top music 50 charts in Japan.
2. I just asked around, nobody in my office has ever heard of this. (My Japanese office... full of IT workers...). Maybe someone who:s not here has heard of her, but
For J-Pop, Perfume (and that stupid ABK group) are popular right now. Utada Hiraru and Amuro Namie continue to release hits and refuse to go out of style. There are a lot of others, but nobody (Except perhaps extreme nerds who specialize in that kind of stuff) knows who Hatsune Miku is.
Only online can stuff be blown so out of proportion by people who don't even live here.
Re:Life imitates Art or Art imitates Life ? (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru [wikipedia.org] - 1996
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macross_Plus [wikipedia.org] - 1994
The concept of a computer-generated 'virtual' singer / popstar isn't really something new at all. It's probably an inevitable consequence of the modern music industry and its manufactured pop artists, fake music videos and whatnot. A virtual idol won't need to eat or sleep, they can never be involved in a scandals, they don't do drugs, they'll do exactly what you tell them, they don't get royalties and they never retire.
Re:I swear I read about this in 80s cyberpunk nove (Score:2, Interesting)
It's like Justin Bieber - an artificial product of the entertainment industry. OK you can't reboot Bieber.
Re:This isn't exactly news... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's only a matter of time until someone links one of the numerous music-generation algorithms up to Vocaloid, adds a vocal writing algorithm (there are automated scientific paper generators, and 99.9% of lyrics are total nonsensical garbage anyway), and uses some artificial phoneme seed samples (from, say, a fluid dynamic simulation of a model of the human vocal cords), and you'd have songs written and sung pretty much entirely without human intervention.
As an aside, if you're interested in trying this out, and don't want to pay for Vocaloid and one of Crypton's soundbanks (Hatsune Miku, Kagamine Rin/Len, Megurine Luka, etc), there's a freeware version called Utau [wikia.com], which not only has a large bank of soundfonts for your to download, but allows you to create your own by singing the seed phonemes into a microphone.
Re:So? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, this article is horrible, and totally fails to describe what the whole Hatsune Miku phenomenon is actually about. It's not simply about a fictional singer, like Gorillaz.
What it is is a piece of software, with a fictional character attached to it. Crypton made the software, and the character, but they don't do anything else. The rest is up to the users. People use the software and make the songs. People also carry the character forward. The whole thing is extremely decentralized. There's nobody who says what Hatsune Miku can or can not do, it's up to whoever is creative enough to put the software to use.
This 3D-effect concert is just a gimmick. Sega bought up the rights for many popular Vocaloid songs, and produced a rhythm game out of them. They also used them to create these concerts.
This is all fascinating for the way it completely turns the usual pop music production model on its head, not because of a 3D model.
Norman Spinrad had him beat by almost a decade (Score:3, Interesting)
Norman Spinrad's 1987 novel Little Heroes [amazon.com] also had virtual pop stars. Not a great novel, by any means, but he beat Gibson to it by 9 years.
The idea isn't that new at all.
Re:Stadium Concerts to Sold Out Crowds? (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't know where you are but it seemed like Miku was everywhere I went in Japan. The concert was at Zepp Tokyo in March, and was probably a promo for the Project Diva arcade game that came out in late June.