Even though I’m not really a Vocaloid fan, I find myself being drawn to it quite a lot. You could say my interest peaked after the concert of this year’s AnimeExpo. ANN recently posted a great, almost PR-like, summary article about Vocaloid, Hatsune Miku and what they managed to achieve. Even though Vocaloid’s success story is a very interesting one, I want to tackle a different aspect; the phenomenon that we view the Vocaloids as more than just the faces behind a software
Vocaloid and Hatsune Miku is just one of those stories that is just too good to not keep telling. I managed to successfully bring up the subject with my friends who are completely oblivious to anything about anime. The story is just too good and too bizarre. ‘Normal’ people can find it quite creepy. If you think about the basic idea behind Miku and what she achieved, it is actually quite creepy. I think we can all agree on that the Vocaloids come the closest to being real persons when they’re singing and dancing on-stage. Cheering on a projected image might seem a pretty stupid thing to do, but people do it en-masse. The phenomenon gives new meaning to ‘falling on deaf ears’. Yet people could care less; whether Miku is actually a person or not, she’s just too real while on stage.
A human isn’t a human because he is a walking bag of cells, it’s how he acts that convinces us a person, or thing, is human. Imagine a ‘person’ of which only the exterior exists (the things we see with our naked eye), but that acts normally. Would you call this a human? For me, the answer is ‘certainly’. This thought experiment is very similar to the Turing-test. The idea is that as long as object-one behaves and looks as we expect object-two would do, we cannot tell the difference between object-one and object-two from a materialistic point of view; a key notion of behaviorism. Of course, even though the Vocaloids look quite realistic compared to past endeavors, they’re still just projections of a few cartoon characters.
Applauding a bunch of dancing pixels is the only logical thing to do when you find yourself thrilled by the music and the dance moves. Whether the pixels in questions can hear it or not are just details; it’s all about the experience you and the people around you want to share with each other. And that’s exactly the main reason people sometimes speak or act as if the Vocaloids are real.
That said, I do wonder whether the crowd will still be cheering as much as they did if there wasn’t a real band standing behind the transparent screen. People also generally agree that the closer a robot behaves like a human, the scarier it gets, till it can act completely as a human where the creepiness fades away immediately. Personifying the Vocaloids as much as we do now indeed feels quite scary when you think about it, but why would you think about it when you’re standing in a overbooked concert hall listening to loud music?
Well, this might be my first and final Vocaloid post, so I’ll just give my opinion of Vocaloid in general here too. Like I said before, I’m not a Vocaloid fan. While I find the phenomenon fascinating, the music produced is anything but. The sound produced by the Vocaloid software is great. Miku’s World Is Mine, Rin’s Meltdown and Len’s Migikata no Chou are in my opinion great examples of that. The lyrics on the other hand, not so much. The music-producers using Vocaloid and/or the fandom itself seem to have a tendency to make and like sick and disturbing lyrics. Of course I’m overly generalizing here, but for the few lyrics or descriptions of songs I looked up they all seemed…well…you know. The instrumental parts seem to be heavily lacking too; they actually sound more robotic than the singing voice.
My favorite voices are Rin and Len. They also look the best in my opinion. Miku sounds too soft and non-realistic. Luka is better, but still not as good as Rin’s and Len’s. And the other obscure Vocaloids? Well you don’t expect me to be listening to Vocaloid songs that much if I don’t like them, do you?
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