Electronic music pioneer Isao Tomita, 80, has announced he will feature a virtual singer Hatsune Miku as the main singer in his upcoming orchestra concert on November 23rd at Tokyo Opera City Hall in Tokyo.
His new piece Ihatov Symphony, which expresses the world of Kenji Miyazawa’s novel, will be performed by Japan Philharmonic Orchestra with a conductor Naoto Otomo. Miku will appear on stage as 3D image and sing and dance in time to music.
Tomita, is one of the pioneers of electronic music best known for his classitronica style albums, including 1974’s Snowflakes are Dancing. He composed main theme of Osamu Tezuka’s “Kimba the White Lion” , “Princess Knight” as well.
Miku is a virtual singer, developed by Crypton Future Media and powered by Yamaha’s Vocaloid technology.
Have any of you ever read the book “The Idoru” by sci-fi master William Gibson? His projection has come to fruition – pun intended.
exactly what I was thinking…
I wonder if literature does influence reality in a way that things eventually happen for real.
I think the whole Hatsune Miku thing is just hilarious. There are already plenty of live videos on YouTube where the crowds cheer to an anime-style hologram. And of course there are the commercials.
If you think about it, it’s quite impressive. From a simple product mascot to a superstar-like fame. I guess that leaves some marketing departments quite jealous 😉
Also there was the film S1m0ne with Al Pacino with a similar premise. The future is bright and opens many possibilities for this kind of entertainment or even education. Imagine being able to be a part of the D-Day walking on the beaches at Normandy among 3D soldiers (and then we’d have artificial scents in the air like gun powder, seaweed etc to enhance it). Or do you want to be a part of The Beatles performing on Ed Sullivan show? Step in this way (screaming mandatory for the female audience).
And so begins the era in which there will be no need for anyone to produce music but 3 programmers and a front man with a Name, with holographic performers preferred. The producers will make even more money with no annoying humans and contracts to engage. I love Tomita’s work and of course, this has an especially Japanese tone, as they often live for anime. I simply see it as natural for the human element to be further displaced by any technology that can fill the role. It’ll be hard for even Lady GaGa to trump a holo-star who can shoot lasers from their eyes and fly.
The virtual Tupac thing seems like music industry bottom feeing, but I’d be interested to see what Tomita does with the technology.
I believe that this is absolutely the direction that we are headed both in film and music. The stars will never age, become unattractive, have substance abuse issues or embarrassing run-ins with the law (unless their creators decide to write this into their stories to pique public interest). We will be able to meet with them in virtual worlds, hang out with them in virtual nightclubs, even have virtual sexual encounters with them. They will be rendered as both holographic projections and even androids on the red carpet. Stars will be created based off of and modified by public opinion, constantly being analyzed via social media. It will be like American Idol in a sense that people will vote for who they want to see more of. There will romances and intriguing back stories that are complete fabrications. Take one look at Nick Minaj-she’s constantly presented as surreal and plastic, and people eat it up. I’m not advocating this, it’s simply the direction that I see unfolding.
I bought the “Miku Flick” iPad game without knowing the backstory or being a big “j-pop” or anime fan. It’s kind of enjoyable, but it’s a pretty expensive app. It then dawned on me that this Miku character likely had a large following I was unaware of. The App Store reviews are incredibly positive even though I can’t yoke anything terribly innovative or intriguing about the game. Having said that, I kind of want that figurine in Tomita’s hand.
Miku is just a product of Cryption media, a bank voice from seiyu Saki Fuyita, that been said every MV in youtube as been maked by normal people, using miku as singer, imagine this, a guy in a room make the music, and somme other guy, in the other side of the country, make the video whit MMD ( aka the models of miku, every1 know ), as this product hits nico nico douga it becomes free for all, in a sense, couse u have to ask for permission related to songs to its authors, but then again its regular plp not companies, so to the concert part, i am a little worried since miku is allways high pich, i dont know what kind of performance she gonna make but, the fact that isao tomita is behind her, its just intriguing. btw forget the bad eng im from mexico 😛
About Gibson’s “Idoru” (1997), I can’t say for sure if Gibson thought of the concept and reality beat him to it, but in 1996 a computer generated idol Kyoko Date was getting as lot of publicity in Japan. The character was computer animated with a human singer supplying the voice. One can go back to the Archies in the 60s for an act that charted but was not “real”. Hatsune Miku is an interesting phenomena in that the character developed a huge social and marketing phenomena from the original intent of providing a character image to be a mascot for a singing synthesis app with much smaller user appeal. I hear what sounds like Vocaloid on Tomita’s 2011 re-working of The Tomita Planets Ultimate Edition (based on Holst). It is interesting that Tomita is composing for orchestra instead of synthesizers, though he has been composing orchestral music since the 1950s. The concert includes other recent orchestral works and I suspect Miku might return for some occasional vocals.