Miku Hatsune Sings

Miku Hatsune is the name of a Virtual Idoru, or Idol. She sings whatever you program her for, because she is software that takes your input and generates custom made anime music from it.

Miku was sampled from anime vocal artist and singer Saki Fujita, who brought to life characters in Bleach, Speed Grapher, Shuffle, and many others. Including Zoku Sayonara Zetsubō Sensei, the show where she actually played the character Hatsune Miku. The software she (and a number of others) was sampled for is Yamaha’s Vocaloid2, a program that lets you enter the lyrics and notes for a song, select the singers, and generate the music. Or you can input the lyrics and play the computer keyboard in realtime to generate the notes. Unlike most software (OK, pretty much all software) I mention here, this program isn’t free by any means, and the crippleware version you can download to try is limited to 5 words and very truncated song length.

But I had to post about it, because very few news reports out of Japan make it to the US. There are Widgets for Miku, multiple CDs released, large user communities, dedicated music players to embed on web pages like the one below, entire anime’s built around the Miku songs generated, other anime voice artists who have since been sampled and call her Big Sister; and for the entire month her sample set was released it was the number one best selling item on Amazon Japan in any category. Pretty impressive for someone who doesn’t actually exist, isn’t it? Rumor has it there is a newer version of the software as well. You might also want to download the MikuMiku Dance animation software to make your own dance videos to go with the songs you create (that one is Freeware, and you probably want the multi-model English version).