“Something to hum while thinking about the end of the world”: Hatsune Miku’s Vocaloid Opera

Last night I saw a pop star, an international celebrity with adoring fans who imitate her style and travel miles to see her. A true global phenomenon. Hatsune Miku took the stage of Paris’s 150 year-old Théâtre du Châtelet dressed in a series of outfits drawn exclusively from Marc Jacobs’s forthcoming spring collection for Louis Vuitton. Her voice soared above a torrent of cascading string arpeggios, white noise bursts, and digital glitches, all emanating from one man with a wild hairdo hunched over in a booth towards the back of the stage, albeit dispersed about the room through a 10.2 channel surround sound system. The stage was decked with vast screen walls receiving over 10,000 lumens from seven different projectors. 

So far, par for the course in an age when spectacular concerts are increasingly a major source of revenue for singers worldwide. Except for one thing: Hatsune Miku never stopped off those video screens. Because Hatsune Miku does not exist.

In 1996, William Gibson wrote a novel called Idoru about a rock star named Rez who falls in love with a synthetically generated Japanese Idol singer named Rei Toei. As her handler Kuwayama explains, Rei Toei is “the result of an array of elaborate constructs that we refer to as ‘desiring machines.’ … aggregates of subjective desire … an architecture of articulated longing …” Her only reality, Rez elaborates “is the realm of ongoing serial creation … Entirely process; infinitely more than the combined sum of her various selves. The platforms sink beneath her, one after another, as she grows denser and more complex…” 

By the time Hatsune Miku started playing ‘live’ arena concerts and opening major rock festivals, she was being described in just these terms: as a virtual Idol singer, the endlessly splintered product of a series of ongoing negotiations and collective fantasies on the part of numerous artists, corporate backers, and fans. But she was not designed as an Idoru like Rei Toei. The creation of Hatsune Miku was much closer to the programming of a new guitar plug-in on Garageband than the grooming of a new pop star.

Miku’s developer, the Crypton Future Media corporation, is a joint stock company (Kabushiki gaisha) founded in Sapporo in 1995. Up until just over five years ago, their business revolved around the production and sale of CDs and DVDs of sound effects, production music and background music, as well as software synthesizer applications for music hardware manufacturers like Roland and Yamaha. When Yamaha released its Vocaloid speech synthesis program in 2004, they contracted Crypton to design two of the virtual singers-in-a-box that came with the package, Meiko and Kaito. Users could buy either of these singers, and simply by entering their desired lyrics and melody, have them sing whatever they wanted.

But three years later, Crypton decided to try something different. When Yamaha released their updated Vocaloid 3 engine, once again they asked Crypton to develop a voice library to sell alongside the software editor. Crypton sampled the Japanese actress Saki Fujita uttering the full range of phonemes, just as they had (using different actors) for their previous Vocaloid products. Then they opted to take this one a step further. So Crypton invited manga artist Kei Garou to design an “android” singer in the distinctive turquoise-blue colour of a Yamaha synthesizer. 

With the image complete, Crypton posted online a personal ‘data sheet’ for their creation, listing her age (16 years old), star sign (virgo), height (5 foot 2), weight (42 kg), birthday (31st August), and best vocal range. They named her Hatsune Miku after the Japanese words for “first” (hatsu), “sound” (ne), and “future” (miku). She was to be “the first sound of the future,” according to her creators, “an android diva in the near-future where songs are lost.” 

To begin with, Miku was marketed, like her predecessors, towards professional music producers. But within four days of her release, fan-made videos of her started to appear on the Japanese video-sharing site Nico Nico Douga. Within twelve days, the Hatsune Miku Vocaloid library had sold un unprecedented 3,000 copies – a figure that has since risen to over 70,000. Canadian fan, Scott Fairbairn claims she is not only “the most illustrated character” of all time, but also “the most prolific singer in history”. Today, Amazon.com lists over 2,000 songs for sale attributed to Miku, many of them by amateur producers, and there are many, many more on YouTube and Nico Nico Douga. Crypton claim there exist over 30,000.

This element of collective, user-generated creation has been the key to Miku’s success. As Fairbairn explains, “One fan might generate an idea for a song and post the partially-finished product on the web, only to have another fan carry on with the project, adding to the original composition and perhaps coming up with a finished song. Then an illustrator might create an image to go with the song, leading to another producer creating a video based on the illustration. Others might create a cover of the same song using the voice of a different Vocaloid.” The process then repeats ad infinitum.

“She’s a wiki-celebrity,” claims MIT professor Ian Condry. “Enough people act on her that she takes on a life, but not of her own – everybody else’s.” While for William Gibson, “Miku is more about the fundamentally virtual nature of all celebrity, the way in which celebrity has always existed apart from the individual possessing it. One’s celebrity actually lives in others.” 

If Crypton were initially taken aback by the scale of Miku’s success, they were quick to catch up and eager to capitalise. They now have their own web community, Piapro, for fans to upload their own Miku-based art and music to, as well as their own record company, KarenT (named after Alvin Toffler’s daughter) to release the best of the fan-made songs. Lucrative corporate sponsorship has come in the form of endorsements for Toyota cars, Google Chrome, the Family Mart supermarket, and Sega video games, who have their own line of Miku games called Project DIVA (an extensive range of projects, nonetheless outnumbered by the huge array of fan-made software applications that bear her image).

In 2009, Hatsune Miku played her first ‘live’ concert. A holographic singer with a full live band. The illusion was created by a technique known as ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ – a 3D-seeming image projected on a forty-five degree-angled glass plane (the same technique was later used to resurrect the dead rapper Tupac Shakur at the Coachella Festival in 2012). And while her first gigs were at Anime Expos, she has since played vast arenas in front of tens of thousands of people and taken the stage at prestigious rock festivals like Summer Sonic. In November 2012 she even sung with the Japanese Philharmonic Orchestra.

And now, this performance at the Théâtre du Châtelet, her first show in Europe. Billed as ‘The End: A Vocaloid Opera’, the piece consisted of a series of distinct numbers united by the running theme of Miku’s reflections upon her own mortality. It makes for a very peculiar experience. Crypton have never specified anything of Miku’s personality and Fairbairn insists this has always been a crucial part of her appeal. She exists as a pure tabula rasa, which according to Fairbain “makes it very easy for each fan to perceive in Miku those qualities which they personally hold in high regard. Each fan’s experience of Hatsune Miku is unique.” 

This poses obvious problems for the development of a music drama with a continuous storyline. As a result, much of the dialogue, written by award-winning playwright Toshiki Okada, sounds like the listless spiel of a Turing Test-failing chatterbot in the midst of an existential crisis. It’s remarkable, in fact, quite how little happens for an hour and a half, beyond Miku’s eventual acceptance that she may die “like humans do” but that’s ok, just so long as she has “something to hum while thinking about the end of the world.”

But beyond the obvious urge to legitimise, through the high cultural cachet of a nineteenth century theatre and the mystical aura of ‘opera’, what is essentially an expensively-branded software instrument; what are we to take from The End?  Principally, perhaps, the experience of an increasingly tenuous line between the real world and its virtual twin. Such doubling is one of the opera’s themes. Right from the beginning, Miku finds herself confronted with someone with the same length and colour hair as her. “What are you doing here?” she asks, “What have you come to say?” A fairly confrontational pair of questions considering the number of audience members who had arrived in full Miku cosplay. 

At the show’s end, Hatsune Miku walks onto the stage and takes a bow next to her composer. In doing so, she steps momentarily into a world in which ‘real’ pop singers are almost universally augmented by digital autotune and plastic surgery, and Tumblr blogs are maintained by ‘otherkin’ who may ‘present’ as human but self-identify as any number of imaginary beasts from comics and computer games. In such a world, it becomes increasingly difficult to think of that line between the actual and fictional as anything else but a highly mobile continuum.

Don DeLillo: The Syntax of the Present

“She spent hours at the computer screen looking at a live-streaming video feed from the edge of a two-lane road in a city in Finland. It was in the middle of the night in Kotka, in Finland, and she watched the screen. It was interesting to her because it was happening now, as she sat here, and because it happened twenty-four hours a day, facelessly, cars entering and leaving Kotka, or just the empty road in the dead times. The dead times were best.” — The Body Artist, Don DeLillo

I've been growing increasingly attached to the syntax – not the characters or the stories, so much, but the syntax, the grammar, the way it affects the rhythms of your reading – in the recent stories of Don DeLillo. Just those ones from the last twelve years, since he started writing very short novels of little more than a hundred pages.

I have always liked short books. I read The Crying of Lot 49 a long time before I read anything else by Thomas Pynchon. And these stories seem to capture everything that I have always liked about short books: the precision, the economy, the sense of a snapshot, a brief window into a story, but one that is marred by gaps, blank spots. Questions are left unanswered, like in a good film.

If I were to make a film, I think I would like it be quite a lot like The Body Artist or Point Omega. The style of the shooting and the editing and the acting should try to capture the syntax of DeLillo's writing.

“She sat and looked at the screen. It was compelling to her, real enough to withstand the circumstance of nothing going on. It thrived on the circumstance. It was three in the morning and she waited for a car to come along—not that she wondered who was in it. It was simply the fact of Kotka. It was the sense of organization, a place contained in an unyielding frame, as it is and as you watch, with a reading of local time in the digital display in a corner of the screen. Kotka was another world but she could see it in its realness, in its hours, minutes and seconds.” — The Body Artist, Don DeLillo

James Bridle somewhere talks about the recent books of William Gibson as a kind of ‘network realism’, writing “that is of and about the network … This writing exists on a timeline, but it’s not a simple line back-to-the-past and forward-to-the-future. It’s a gathering-together of many currently possible worldlines, seen from the near-omniscient superposition of the network.”

I once interviewed Bridle for Wired and via Skype he spoke about the way these hovering penguin drones that turn up in Zero History seem to have slipped straight out of a YouTube clip that Gibson may have been watching as he wrote, from one window on his computer desktop into another, entering the fiction from the (quasi-)real world of the network.

I have included these extracts from The Body Artist, about the traffic feed from Kotka, to illustrate the way I think this is equally true of DeLillo.

But one could also point to the strange boy the main character meets in her home in this book, whom she calls Mr. Tuttle. The way he speaks – chopping up fragments of what he has heard, processing it, decontextualising it, stripping it of meaning – so closely resembles the modus operandi of spambots on Twitter. A human language generated spontaneously by Markov operations. The syntax again.

“She set aside time every day for the webcam at Kotka. She didn't know the meaning of this feed but took it as an act of floating poetry. It was best in the dead times. It emptied her mind and made her feel the deep silence of other places, the mystery of seeing over the world to a place stripped of everything but a road that approaches and recedes, both realities occurring at once, and the numbers changed in the digital display with an odd and hollow urgency, the seconds advancing toward the minute, the minutes climbing hourward, and she sat and watched, waiting for a car to take fleeting shape on the roadway.” —  The Body Artist, Don DeLillo

I think arguably DeLillo comes closer than Gibson to capturing what is so peculiar about the present, its strange sense of dislocation, its atemporality. “Life is too contemporary,” as Didi Fancher says in Cosmopolis. While, at the same time, the “present is harder to find.” This is why, I think, Cosmopolis the film is one of the best science fiction films of the last ten years. It is not set in the future. There are no aliens or extraordinary technologies. But it has the feel of science fiction.

This is what William Gibson says about the present. That he no longer writes novels set in the future because the present already feels like science fiction, it already has the strangeness that people once looked to the future for. 

But where Gibson still writes about computers and surveillance and branding, DeLillo is picking up on something else. Often – as in The Body Artist or Point Omega's long rumination about Douglas Gordon's Twenty-Four Hour Psycho – contemporary art. In Cosmopolis, however, this has been subsumed – bought up, if you like – by something else, “What is it Michael? The interaction between technology and capital. The inseparability.”

More than that, though, it is something about the way things unfold. The rhythm and the feel of their unfolding. The syntax of the present.

Humans Imitating Robots Imitating Humans: Consequences of the Late Arrival of The Future

Capital has a problem (one of many, you might add). The Future was supposed to have arrived by now. For a hundred years we've been promised a fully automated robot slave force by the millenium, but despite the fact that we can train a robot to play the violin (albeit, quite badly), we still haven't got them to replace all human drudgery. The software hasn't quite lived up to its promises, so we've been forced to fall back on the wetware (that's you and me). If, as this Guardian article somewhat apocalyptically suggest, we have all grown rather blasé about the horror of sweatshops, is it because we had rather grown accustomed to the idea that they were all staffed by machines by now?

In a sense, nothing has changed, except the language, and it is a language of lowered expectations. William Gibson waves goodbye to the "Big F Future", and Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon (and, if the implications of this article are to be taken seriously, proud owner of not one but two first edition copies of Mein Kampf), invents something he calls "Artificial Artificial Intelligence."

Behind the notion of AAI lies the admission that there are still a number of things, simple "processing tasks", that computers really aren't very good at - recognising patterns and faces, for instance - so why not outsource them to a hive of live humans, caged like monkeys and attached to a bio-mechanical matrix through a tube running directly into their brains? Actually, Bezos's company, dubbed Amazon Mechanical Turk, hasn't quite got round to the cages or the bio-mechanical matrix yet, but no doubt he's working on it.

The original "Turk" was a fairground wheeze which toured the palaces, museums, cafes and hotel lobbies of Europe and America from the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth centuries. Apparently composed of nothing more than clockwork and mechanics, the device was nonetheless able to play chess - and win - against such luminaries as Napolean, Catherine the Great, Benjamin Franklin and Edgar Allen Poe, few of whom guessed the truth that, like Bezos's flesh-powered search engine, the machine concealed a rather nimble human operator.

This scenario of humans-replacing-machines-replacing-humans in recursively stacked hierarchies, recalls an old Richard Matheson story, called 'Steel', about an eponymously nicknamed ex-boxer, from back in the days when real human boxers would actually fight it out in the ring. Nowadays, our erstwhile pugilist owns and 'manages' a robot boxer, a clapped out old B2 called 'Battling Maxo'. Just before the big match Battling Maxo's circuits give out and the spring in its robot arm breaks, so Steel decides to go into the ring himself, imitating his defunct robot, and fight the new B7, 'Maynard Flash' with his bare hands. Hopelessly defeated by the robot boxer, Steel crawls out of the ring and demands his pay from the promoter. And therein lies the final insult - just like the Amazon Mechanical Turk and other AAI companies, not only is the labour punishing and dehumanising, but the pay is a pittance compared to what would be given to the operator of a real computer. Steel is only paid half what he would have got had his robot been up to the bout.