Still Be Here. the Multiplicity of Hatsune Miku
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STILL BE HERE. ThE MULTIPLICITY OF HATSUNE MIKU By Laurel Halo & Mari Matsutoya Name: Hatsune Miku Release: August 31, 2007 Age: 16 years Height: 158cm / 5ft 2in Weight: 42kg / 93lb Suggested Genre: Pop, rock, dance, house, techno, crossover Suggested Tempo Range: 70–150bpm Suggested Vocal Range: A3–E5, B2–B3 This essay was first published in After Us 2 (2017), http://www.aft3r.us/still-be-here/, access: Juni 20, 2019, and is here reprinted with kind permission by the authors, artists and editors. Suggested citation: Laurel Halo and Mari Matsutoya, After Us. The Multiplicity of Hatsune Miku. Interface Critique Journal 2 (2019), pp. 143–149. DOI: 10.11588/ic.2019.2.66988 This article is released under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0). Halo & Matsutoya / STILL BE HERE Illustration by LaTurbo Avedon and Martin Sulzer. I’m searching for the drop of a sound the next generation of pop stars. These 探していた 一 滴 の 音 songs and concomitant catalogues gene- rate timelines of cultural clues, revealing the evolving social dynamics by which A pop star is usually the product of coll- common appeal and desire change over ective effort. Songwriters, producers, ma- time. nagers, labels, publishers, press agents, Hatsune Miku is unique among pop vocal coaches, stage parents, booking stars active today in that her song cata- agents, stylists, promoters, music video logue is the largest of any artist in the directors, other industry players, and history of the world. It may sound dra- fans all come together to drive the voice, matic, but the diminutive permanent face and personality – the pop star – to 16-year-old with body-length teal pigtails become extrahuman: to achieve immor- has over 100,000 songs in her catalogue. tality through hit singles and albums. What is also unique about Miku is that Their songs are explosively resonant these songs are almost entirely written with large groups of people, striking the by her fans; Miku literally sings their ley lines between catchiness, emotion, words for them. She is the face, figure fashion and contemporary attitude. Hit and personality of Crypton Future Me- songs are sung in herds; used to har- dia’s Vocaloid 2 software. Anyone with vest royalties and sell out stadiums; be- the software can program songs for her come banal and fade away; and perhaps, to sing, chaining syllables to a melody live second lives sampled or covered by along a timeline, adding moments of 144 INTERFACE CRITIQUE JOURNAL – VOL. 2 – 2019 melismatic, accented or soft delivery. Miku herself began to emerge as more One can even control the intensity and than a mascot: she was becoming a pop duration of her vibrato. She is primarily star with a personality, with brand power created by her fans, for her fans to con- far beyond the scope of singing software. sume. During this time various companies in- Miku is a typical example of both dou- cluding Google, Toyota and Family Mart jin culture in Japan – that is, amateur all featured her in advertisements, and self-published fan creations based on further spin-off products followed, in- famous characters – and nijisousaku, cluding SEGA’s Project Diva dancing literally translated as secondary deriva- video game and Korg’s Miku Stompbox tives. Yet when her fans also create her vocal effects pedal. And naturally, she massive catalogue, it presents a hitherto gave and continues to give concerts to unseen hybrid of pop, doujin and niji- audiences in the thousands across the sousaku culture. She is both the recep- world, performing on stage with a live tive and reflective vessel of her fans; a band behind her – as well as to the most depository for the emotions, ambitions personal one-to-one bedroom audiences and talents of would-be pop songwriters, at home. producers and recording artists; a voice Still Be Here is a hybrid performance singing songs written by the masses, for piece featuring Hatsune Miku, collabora- the masses. Several of her songs have tively created by five artists from various gone on to chart in Japan, and dozens disciplines: sound artist Mari Matsutoya, more have millions of views on both You- composer Laurel Halo, digital artists Tube and the Japanese equivalent, Nico- Martin Sulzer and LaTurbo Avedon, and nicodouga. Fans also produce her music choreographer Darren Johnston. Our aim videos: creators have made open-source was to create a work that reflected on Mi- 3D models of Miku that can be choreo- ku’s various parallel identities, in the typ- graphed in the user-generated freeware ical fashion of her creation – networked program Miku Miku Dance (MMD), both and collaborative. We came together un- now intrinsic to the whole creation pro- der the name of Hatsune Miku, to explore cess. Thus both the fan-written and fan- a collective existence in a capital-driven animated videos proliferate. society. It sheds light not only onto her, Crypton Future Media was prescient to but also onto the protagonists behind her, identify the viral doujin potential of Miku, beyond the screen. With this piece we at- and has almost entirely allowed unhin- tempt to scrub the components of her il- dered derivations of Miku, provided that lusion, of her stardom, of her nature as a they do not harm the character, or hurt collective fantasy, all of which is born out or offend anyone. In providing such free- of a Yamaha Vocaloid software script, dom they not only caused a huge spike in and a character licensed under Creative Vocaloid 2 sales, but also a mass explo- Commons by Crypton Future Media. sion of Miku content. Within a few years, The format of Still Be Here lies some- 145 Halo & Matsutoya / STILL BE HERE The premiere of Still Be Here at CTM/transmediale, 2016. Photo: Udo Siegfriedt. where between concert and documen- using pop music videos as reference tary, using both original and existing points for her movement. Her environ- visual, lyrical and musical materials; the ment is made of various components of piece plays out in the precarious grey MMD stages and props, freely available zone inhabited by so many anonymous in exchange for accreditation. producers who use derivative material, When the Vocaloid software became including Miku’s doujin creators. Each of available to the public for the first time, the songs in the piece are original com- Miku’s songs were written through “her” positions, but the lyrics are taken from perspective, with lyrics from her “per- many sources: the folk song underlying a sonal” experience defined by her age, common crosswalk song in Japan; frag- status as a not-yet-realized pop star, and ments of various Miku songs; a love let- relationship with her ‘master’ songwrit- ter from a fan; slogans from the corpora- ers and producers. Assumptive teengirl tions who have used her as a mascot. Her issues – love, longing, cute boys, general dance sequences were motion-captured insecurity – were mixed with the ex- from a live dancer and grafted onto the istential issues that come with being a beautiful Miku model by illustrator Tda, virtual pop star: probing the relationship 146 INTERFACE CRITIQUE JOURNAL – VOL. 2 – 2019 between herself and her songwriters; Users gradually got used to the idea of her ambitions to hit number one on the Miku as a packaged singer, and through charts; her continuing relevance despite this shift, she was able to achieve a cer- her solely digital experience. There is a tain level of autonomy. The lyrics were fair amount of angst over impermanence no longer tied to her assumptive world and power imbalance within her songs; view, but rather expressed those of the the relationship between Miku and her producers. Consider the fact that many “masters” is often fraught – her wanting Japanese music journalists (including to succeed for them, yet never actually Tomonori Shiba, author of Why Did Hats- feeling up to the task. Certain songs like une Miku Change the World?) identify “The Disappearance of Hatsune Miku” the song “Melt” as a huge turning point even go so far as to illustrate a suicidal, for the Hatsune Miku-genshou (Hatsune self-hating Miku, desiring to be no more, Miku phenomenon). In “Melt”, Miku de- to be deleted (paralleling, perhaps, the picts a shy girl who gets her bangs cut so common desire to scrub the Internet of that her boy will notice; a generic but re- one’s “true” identity). Just like a real ce- al-world experience that is not specific to lebrity, we see Miku work through vari- Miku’s perspective as a virtual pop star. ous phases of identity crises that are The autonomy here is her escape from retraceable through her lyrical deposit. the puppetry on behalf of the creators, This perspective is apparent in the fact and she is recognized instead as simply that the earliest songs on iTunes using a singer, with lyrics both unchained from Vocaloids are credited simply to Hatsune her experience and possessing compli- Miku, and the producers’ names are no- cated human metaphoric expression. where to be seen. It is only later on that This was a huge moment for the origi- the songs began to be credited as: [pro- nal developers of the Vocaloid software, ducer’s name] ft. Hatsune Miku; and then as it meant that she was, for the first further on, just the producer’s name. time, recognized not just as the digital songstress trapped in your computer, but as a more universal pop star figure. I wake up in the morning At the same time, because of its ac- And immediately I start to think of you cessibility to the general public, “Melt” I decided to cut my bangs sparked a chain reaction of another kind Just to hear you say, “What happened?” of song production, namely the utattemi- ta and later the odottemita songs (literally 朝目が覚めて translated as “I had a go at singing it” and 真っ先に思い浮かぶ君のこと “I had a go at dancing it”), where amateur 思い切って前髪を切った creators started to sing and dance Voca- 「どうしたの」って聞かれたくて loid songs as humans.