Our avatars, let us show you them! Not quite Ed Sullivan introducing America to the Beatles. Hatsune Miku:
The name of the character comes from merging the Japanese words for first (初 hatsu?), sound (音 ne?) and future (Miku (ミク?) sounds like a nanori reading of future, 未来, normally read as “mirai”[2]), referring to her position as the first of Crypton’s “Character Vocal Series”. According to Crypton, her name is meant to signify the “first sound from the future”.
grillo
I have no idea why it occurred to me to search for this
Amir Khalid
Maybe TMZ could figure out a way for Hatsune Miku to have some sort of scandal. A pop star isn’t complete without a silly manufactured scandal.
Steeplejack
@Amir Khalid:
Sign her to the Disney Channel. The scandal will follow.
Alex
Is this really a thing now? Because if so I’m ready to check out entirely, somewhat like Cartman: http://youtu.be/jpsIZL6ACso
Steeplejack
@Alex:
Linky no work for me. This one does.
Mnemosyne
Not really sure how this is different from other animated pop stars. Can one of you kids explain it to me before getting off my lawn?
Violet
Without electricity that “performer” doesn’t exist. What will they do when the Obola ISIS apocalypse arrives?
Steeplejack
Royals go up 6-5 on an Alex Gordon homer in the top of the 10th inning. Hope the Orioles can come back.
Ernie Johnson’s play-by-play is killing me. He’s trying to inject drama, and his voice is the opposite of that.
grillo
@Alex: I guess I have been expecting this for some time. Ever since I saw Rebecca Black’s video where she is autotuned so much that she might as well have been chanting rather than singing and they move her around like a prop. It occurred to me that it is only a tiny increment to delete the human completely and just do it all with a computer.
So it was always going to be a thing.
And William Gibson called this in the late 1990s.
Tenar Darell
@Mnemosyne: hey, were you able to pick-up an absentee ballot? I had a real d’oh moment when I realized you’re in California & I’m in Massachusrtts so the rules are probably different. Again, d’oh, and a my bad.
grillo
@Mnemosyne: I am elderly. However I would observe that what is different here is that there is no voice actor. There is no human at all. The singing and the actions of the character are all programmed. That is what is different.
Mnemosyne
@Tenar Darell:
No worries — I ended up applying for a one-time Vote by Mail ballot, which I should get sometime next week. It seemed easier than driving 2 hours round-trip to vote at the sole early voting location in my county.
tratclif
@Mnemosyne: The Gorillaz are human musicians (and the animation of the live performance looks like it’s motion-captured musicians). Hatsune Miku is entirely computer generated, voice and movement.
Steeplejack
@grillo:
LOL, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a YouTube video with the ratio of likes/dislikes that Rebecca Black one has: 394,072 likes, 1,431,990 dislikes.
Amir Khalid
@Mnemosyne:
Gorillaz’s music is played by human musicians, and its vocals vocalised by humans. Whereas, per Wikipedia, Hatsune Miku’s a Vocaloid: her voice is phonetic elements recorded by a voice actress, synthesised by a studio using Yamaha’s Vocaloid software.
Mnemosyne
@grillo:
So it makes her different than a regular animated character … how? I honestly don’t get it.
Also, they can do some pretty amazing things with interactive animation now. IIRC, the Turtle Talk attraction at Disney California Adventure is interactive animation, not a guy with a microphone sitting behind the screen.
Steeplejack
Mike Moustakas adds a two-run homer! Now 8-5 for the Royals and not looking good for the O-birds.
grillo
@Mnemosyne: But there were voice actors saying all the different things that the cartoon creatures say. Somebody sat in front of a microphone at one time recording utterances.
For this there was no such step. There was a voice talent whose voice they analyzed but she did not record every word or sound that the character says. Those turtles can’t say anything that a human did not record at one time. Hatsune can just be programmed to sing with no human at a microphone at all.
grillo
@Steeplejack: When I put up that link a few minutes ago I saw a video in the side bar that made me sad. Rebecca Black did an acapella cover of Royals to prove she can really sing.
But she can’t.
PurpleGirl
@Amir Khalid: Put her in pron anime. That could create a scandal.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
I want to know what genius decided to give LA county just one early voting location. We have more people than New Jersey; shouldn’t we have more than one early voting location?
Roger Moore
@PurpleGirl:
And probably a bunch of money, which is the big goal.
Mnemosyne
@grillo:
So she’s like a GPS that can sing? IIRC, that’s how they come up with GPS directions — the voice person records specific words and syllables, and the computer puts them together. That’s why you get some strange pronunciations sometimes — because it’s an assemblage of pre-recorded syllables that the computer thinks are right.
I know that the holy grail of the entertainment industry (where I work) is to get rid of those pesky actors and their demands, but you still have to start with a human and have all of the data manipulated by humans. We’re a very, very long way from computer-generated entertainment.
Radio One
that video is a hellish nightmare that is only going to reinforce Charlie Brooker’s point if he continues his Black Mirror series.
Morbo
@PurpleGirl: The probability that this has not already been done is 0%.
Amir Khalid
@Mnemosyne:
Well, she’s the synthesised-voice part of a GPS, tweaked to make her “sing”. I doubt she could give directions. She still sounds unpleasantly fake to me.
Mnemosyne
@Amir Khalid:
For obvious reasons, I’m interested in animation, but trying to create characters with synthetic voices seems like a dead end to me. But, then, I’ve always half-suspected that the reason the Giant Evil Corporation first dipped their toe into the computer animation pond was that the former CEO thought he could have the IT staff who installed his computer also make the movies. That’s not how it works, Michael.
Amir Khalid
@Mnemosyne:
I think real voices are a much better way to go, don’t you?
ruemara
Well, that gave the Minmay Defense a run for awful.
LesGS
Interesting, viewed once, but not compelling. I wouldn’t seek out further pieces by the group.
Why is only the (female) singer fake? Why not one or more of the male instrumentalists?
VFX Lurker
@LesGS:
I’m guessing cost played a factor. It’s expensive enough to have an army of artists and technicians craft just one character.
Hobbes
The vocaloid version of the song Kimi no Shiranai Monogatari is a better demonstration of her voice.
Applejinx
And now human women have to LOOK like that in order to compete! Better get some eye enlargement surgery, ASAP D:
Nikolita
She has at least one game to her name, too. Look up Hatsune Miku Project Diva F – like DdR meets moving strobe lights. Didn’t get to play it for long, but I’d like to order it online when I have the money. “Tell Your World” is a song from the game I really enjoy, and I recently put it on my iPod too. ^^
Robert Sneddon
Hatsune Miki’s been around in Japan for a few years now, lots of cosplay. Try Googling “cosplay hatsune miku images” sometime. Yes, there is also amateur porn (doujinshi) and the like. Rule 34 applies as always.
The mix of live performers and an animated character is done using a “Pepper’s Ghost” illusion setup, it’s not that clear in the 2-D TV recording of the Letterman show but she looks more 3-D than that in a stage show. Still not 100%, it requires a very elaborate lighting setup to work and it only works well for a narrow viewing angle.
Frankensteinbeck
I like Vocaloids, so let me explain. Miku was not made to be a pop idol. That’s a coincidence, because Vocaloids became very popular.
Vocaloids is a computer program, purchasable and usable by anybody, that sings artificially. Whatever you want, Miku can sing it, with tone and emphasis. Not just Miku, either. They have a host of characters, male and female. Technologically, this is pretty amazing.
Amateur creators use animation programs to combine Vocaloids with animated videos of her they made, or videos of anything else that amuses them. They range from the completely ridiculous, to the super-imaginative and traditionally drawn, to the body horror Bacterial Contamination that I’ll spare you ’cause WP hates three links.
Vocaloids is REALLY popular, so much so that they started making Miku do live stage performances.
different-church-lady
Whatever that is, make it stop.
A Humble Lurker
@grillo:
Actually that’s not true. Hatsune Miku was made with voice samples from Japanese voice actor Fujita Saki. While she herself didn’t sing the song, she did sing the words that were then used FOR the song.
Matt McIrvin
@Mnemosyne: I’ve seen the version of Turtle Talk at Epcot (and the “Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor” at Disney World Magic Kingdom, which is a similar deal).
What they are are improv shows with computer-animated puppets. There’s clearly a human being in the loop, doing the voice and understanding the audience’s statements. But the operator can control the animation in real time, like a videogame character, and the character’s mouth is automatically synced to the audio.
Mnemosyne
@Matt McIrvin:
There’s some puppetry, but it’s not all puppetry. That’s why, if an unusual question is asked, Crush swims for a longer period of time as they frantically try to find a pre-record that fits.