Wow! This reminds me of the book Idoru by Willam Gibson.
Idoru on Wikipedia:
"In the post Tokyo/San Francisco earthquake world of the early 21st century, Colin Laney is referred to agents of the aging mega-rock star Rez (of the musical group Lo/Rez, and seemingly very much styled after former The Smiths frontman, Morrissey) for a job using his peculiar talent of sifting through vast amounts of mundane data to find "nodal points" of particular relevance. Rez has claimed to want to marry a synthetic personality named Rei Toei, the Idoru (Japanese Idol) of the title, which is apparently impossible and therefore questioned by his loyal staff, particularly by his head of security, Blackwell.[...]"
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru
This is one case where Gibson was slightly behind. Japan has been looking forward to holographic rock stars since Macross Plus in 1994 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKcud4Qs4_U#t=4m50s) --just ahead of Idoru (1996).
This reminds me of a short cyberpunk story. I can't remember the name/author, but it was about a world where the next level of entertainment was essentially generated from a brainmap of the "artist." There was a girl who was disabled/disfigured/diseased, and she ended up becoming the biggest and most popular artist ever due to the raw emotions she was conveying.
At the end she transfers her consciousness "to the cloud" and becomes completely digitized.
But only because by his point of view, the present is effectively the future he looked forward to. I've always felt it's both an interesting and bold position for a writer of sci-fi to take.
There's a good documentary on Hatsune Miku here - it's in Japanese but with English subtitles (click the 'CC' logo in the bottom right of the YouTube player to turn them on):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBZOlipfjkQ
I find the Hatsune Miku phenomenon somewhat amusing at the moment, given the trend of overt Autotuning in pop music - while virtual singers' voices are getting more realistic, real singers' voices are being manipulated to sound impossibly accurate and digital.
It's also an interesting study in image and marketing: Crypton really pushed the concept of associating a character with the voice, as if Vocaloids were virtual pop stars whose services you could buy, rather than just another virtual instrument.
I guess its the next logical step. If the pop singer doesn't write their own song, doesn't sing their own song live, and doesn't understand the lyrics; you might as well just use a hologram.
I never realized how frightening a life sized version of an anime character is. Still, its an interesting phenomenon.
This looks more like rear-projection video (note the starburst in the back of the stage) or Pepper's Ghost, although the scrim is too vertically oriented to be that.
Nothing here looks 3D, but of course these videos are very carefully shot and enhanced from all appearances.
You're right, this is the same technology used for the Gorillaz tour a few years back. In that case, some very talented, real musicians were hiding their wrinkles and gray hair behind the screens.
It's worth noting that all of these videos and songs are completely fan-made. There is no official representative of Miku Hatsune; that's sort of the point. You can make her sing anything you want. She's more of a platform than a star.
There are several other vocaloid singers besides Miku. The whole thing is very popular on the Japanese video site Nico Nico Douga.
If we are talking a "virtual" rock star, I prefer a hybrid approach, like sushi k in snowcrash. A real, single musician writing and performing, but using different mediums - the metaverse in snowcrash, or maybe even holograms in real life.
Reminds me of Genki Rockets, which also has a "vocaloid" singer synthesized from a couple of female singers. I first found out about this sort of think when I was working for Henk Rogers (Tetris mogul) down in Honolulu. The office was always full of really big names from Japan, like the guys from Square Enix, Nintendo, etc... The guys that made Lumines II were in the office playing some sick blu-ray footage of a Genki Rockets concert and from that moment on I was hooked. The DJ was wearing an astronaut suit and there was a hologram projection of Lumi singing and dancing above the crowd. So sick!
Slightly different. Gorillaz band members are usually voiced by one real artist (although this artist can change from album to album), whereas Hatsune Miku is one step removed - while there was a real voice actress providing the foundation for her voice, the actual lyrics sung don't pass through any human mouth.
The persona of Hatsune Miku also seems to have evolved a little more organically: the style and personalities of Gorillaz are basically driven by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett; Hatsune Miku started out as an image on a software box, but got adopted by the internet community who produce videos based on her, with quite diverse personality and style.
The persona of Hatsune Miku also seems to have evolved a little more organically: the style and personalities of Gorillaz are basically driven by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett; Hatsune Miku started out as an image on a software box
I want to see the crossover!
EDIT: Really, I want to see her animated with the keyframes by Hewlett.
Cope's earlier work with EMI is also pretty awesome; the idea of using as a training set a composer's body of work in order to produce new music in that same style is very cool.
Entirely computers. Hatsune Miku and similar software are basically voice synthesizers geared towards music, as I understand it, not hugely unlike other text-to-speech programs but with more control of pitch, tone, and so forth.
Also, as far as making artificial intelligences compose and perform, it might be interesting to hook up Hatsune Miku to a Markov chain generator[1], and feed it a bunch of j-pop as input. Would probably take some fine-tuning and modification to get it to give output that the synthesizer would understand (as it would be dealing with both words and notes), but it's not too far fetched.
[1] Which isn't an AI by any means, being more of way of generating text based on statistical correlations between words in the input body of data, but it comes up with some rather interesting things.
Fully voiced by the computer.
Think of a midi keyboard that also has a 'syllable' component for each note: So for example you make her sing the syllable 'Ka' in middle C.
There are also a dozen or so other knobs that control how it is sung at that particular point in time.
You input the lyrics, notes, scale, tempo and dynamics; the software will produce a voice based on those parameters. Then you can record it to share it as an audio file. Here's a quick FAQ on the official site: http://www.vocaloid.com/en/technical_faq.html
I have to admit, I'm getting a little uncanny-valley vibe from that. The movement is too crisp (they've got to be digitizing the movement of a human dancer?) in combination with the cartoony appearance.
Yes. I think it would've actually worked better if the toon shading was a bit more "toony" and the frame rate was lowered to 12. It would seem more "magical" that way, like the mixed live/cartoon scenes in Mary Poppins.
It seems like a real loss for humanity and a real gain for special interests (although it can be argued that humans can be manipulated as easily as this hologram for such purposes).
In any case, this isn't part of any future I'll be embracing.
So a 'performer' that doesn't write their own songs, sing their own songs or even do their own choreography isn't already a real loss for humanity?
We elevate talentless, brainless schmucks to the pinnacle of our culture apparently just to watch them fall from grace. How is going one step further to an artificial performer less human? At least no one is hurt when they go on a crack/booze/heroin/etc binge. And at least I won't have to hear of some dumb bitch shaving her head and nigh-on abusing her kids on a daily basis.
Idoru on Wikipedia: "In the post Tokyo/San Francisco earthquake world of the early 21st century, Colin Laney is referred to agents of the aging mega-rock star Rez (of the musical group Lo/Rez, and seemingly very much styled after former The Smiths frontman, Morrissey) for a job using his peculiar talent of sifting through vast amounts of mundane data to find "nodal points" of particular relevance. Rez has claimed to want to marry a synthetic personality named Rei Toei, the Idoru (Japanese Idol) of the title, which is apparently impossible and therefore questioned by his loyal staff, particularly by his head of security, Blackwell.[...]" source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru