Official Art for Hatsune Miku from Crypton Future Media
So, I went to see Hatsune Miku yesterday, which was being brought in as part of Anime Festival Asia 2011, at Suntec City. Single day anisong tickets had very nearly sold out, and to get around that I ended up buying the ridiculous 3 day anisong ticket. So that left me wondering, who would be going to see Hatsune Miku in the first place, for tickets to have nearly sold out? How big could the vocaloid fanbase be here? What was their audience even, besides a few creepy oddballs like me who are more interested in it from a weird sociocultural perspective?…
Well, the answer was a lot more simple and innocent than I expected: CHILDREN! But of course! CHILDREN LOVE SHINY CUTE THINGS AS WELL! Secondary school age kids, and maybe even primary school kids! Shrieking, rabid, pimply faced school-going young adolescents on their holiday break! Hordes and hordes of gangly chinese male teenagers, mostly overshadowed by their immacculately dressed, cosplaying female same-age peers! I saw at least four different Hatsune Mikus in the crowd, a smattering of french maids, and even some smurfs (???)
The queues were very very long outside, but one clear sign of this demographic was: the number of parents clearly waiting for their children outside before and after the event. There was also a visible presence of a few slightly harried looking parents accompanying their excitable (but properly, neatly dressed) pre-teen children inside. To be fair, I think there was a slightly higher concentration of young boys than girls, as when they started screaming MIKU MIKU MIKU MIKUUUUU, it sounded rather much like an army of young boys (and not young girls).
I had gone there alone, but there was also the odd japanese businessman in a suit who had turned up there alone. And even though I’m not all that old, the age difference between me and the average audience member was still painfully apparent. And when I think about it, it has practically been 10 years since I first went to a cosplay here, when oddly enough, I used to go down to such things with H, in our junior college days. More than 10 years! A decade! How could it be so long! Back then, I had felt it was a small, rather niche interest group. Could we have imagined that in a few years anime and cosplaying would explode in such a big way here? For it to be part of the mainstream, almost? To see hundreds, thousands of teenagers thronging this hall to watch Hatsune Miku?
To give you some background, Hatsune Miku was the first commercially successful vocaloid pop idol, and the name of the title and the character of the software had been chosen by combining Hatsu (初, first), Ne (音, sound), and Miku (未来, future) – thus the meaning of Hatsune Miku could be translated to “the first sound from the future.”
The stage setup was not exactly what I expected. Audience with General Admission passes were corralled at the back – so far back that we were behind the technicians and video crew that was to be providing the LIVE VIDEO coverage of the event on big screens. Hatsune Miku was indeed, just a small, true-to-human-size anime girl being projected on a screen at the front of the huge hall. The stage had been raised to the point that in order to look at her, you had to raise your head up quite a bit to look up. People were furiously waving their lightsticks from the start to the end of the show, almost as if they believed that the pumping motion of their lightsticks was generating the energy that kept the stage lighted up. A lot of the audience (especially the shorter teenagers) were jumping constantly and nonstop during the entire 1.5 hour show, possibly also because the height of the stage made it hard to see unless you were JUMPING. I wonder if the stage arrangement was intentional…
This also produced what I considered to be a pretty strange feedback loop. Let me illustrate with this photo of Rin/Len Kagamine, another vocaloid singing at the event – which was the clearest photo I have of this feedback loop:
Aptly, the name Kagamine is derived from: Kagami (鏡, mirror) and Ne (音, sound). Kagamine was the second vocaloid program to be released and it consists of two characters, Rin (female) and Len (male) – a slightly lower toned female/young male voice. If you ask me, I actually prefer Kagamine because it is occassionally less HIGH PITCHED. Occasionally. Its still pretty damn high-pitched. Yes folks, even Debbie has a limit for squeakiness, after sitting through an hour of super-high pitched SQUEEEEEEEEEEEE sounds going at 160bpm.
So for most of the night, I am standing behind a teenage girl dressed as Hatsune Miku who is trying to do all the dance moves that she probably learnt from a video of Hatsune Miku, while looking at a live projection of Hatsune Miku, while the live event coverage is looping an image of everyone looking at a live projection of Hatsune Miku and broadcasting it back to us on the large projection screens. And due to the location of General Admission ticketholders, some of us are also simultaneously looking straight into the video monitors which were feedback-looping us ALL THIS SKULLDUGGERY! AAAAAHH!
And most importantly, Hatsune Miku really knows how to work up the crowd. Many times during the performance, the projected image of Hatsune Miku would run from end to end of the screen like a small excited girl might do, encouraging people to cheer and raise their lightsticks. Other conventions of live performance were observed, such as Hatsune Miku smiling and politely bowing to the audience after songs; giving a bashful smile when there were cheers (BTW HER FACE EVEN TEMPORARILY TURNS INTO A FLAT 2D LINE CARTOON WHICH LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE THIS EMOTICON: ≧∇≦ ); looking over at her bandmates while performing, and later, also introducing them one by one as if she were a real person in the room. These lifelike interactions were always met by a cheerful roar from the audience and intense waving of lightsticks.
WE ARE LOOKING AT THE ULTIMATE SIMULACRA OF MODERN LIFE HERE
Rin Kagamine – 炉心融解 (Reactor Core Meltdown)
Lyrics: “hey, take me to the nuclear reactor
if i could dive into the core, then cry, cry, cry…”
It is almost as if this cry is the same “aestheticized cry” that DJ /rupture was writing about in his article about autotune.
He writes: “Lil Wayne records with Auto-Tune on – no untreated vocal version exists. In an era of powerful computers that allow one to audition all manner of effects on vocals after the recording session, recording direct with Auto-Tune means full commitment. There is no longer an original ‘naked’ version. This is a cyborg embrace. In Cyborg Manifesto (1991), Donna Haraway notes that ‘the relation between organism and machine has been a border war.’ Auto-Tune’s creative deployment is fully compatible with her ‘argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.”
The vocaloid is the ultimate musical cyborg, cleverly marketed and ready-packaged for mass consumption. There is no more original singer, no human behind the screen, no original reference. The character is shaped to look like human to us, and popularly designed to look like a cute teen idol. Instead Hatsune Miku is also released as a software which users can use to generate new songs! And people do so, all over the internet, which is also why the vocaloid has popularity even outside of Japan. (I approve of anything that encourages people to go out and make their own things!)
From my viewpoint, the popular acceptance of vocaloid in Japan seems quite natural, since Japan is the one of the leaders in the construction and use of industrial robots, and research into human-like robots and human/robot interactions. So the question is, could something like Hatsune Miku make it equally big outside of Asia? How would it fare in America or in Europe, I wonder? I guess this would depend on whether it would be possible for people to accept a vision of computers and cyborgs being the ones to sing you your lullabies at night.
What do you think of it, then?