Ex Pop Music by Ex Happyender Girl
Pour la version française de l'artiste, il faut cliquer ici : https://musique-journal.fr/2023/03/14/la-vie-intime-dune-chanteuse-artificielle/
Artwork from the album Ex Pop Music by Ex Happyender Girl, showing Hatsune Miku with a seal on her face.
If Satie had met the videogames spaces and the internet, would he have wondered if music has the power to redefine imaginary spaces ? One of the powers of Ex Pop Music by Ex Happyender Girl was to make me understand that imaginary spaces can emerge from the sound.
Ex Happyender Girl (formerly known as Happyender Girl) is a music group composed of composer Cicada_sss and singer Hatsune Miku. For those who do not yet know Hatsune Miku, she is a 16-year-old singer who sings in all the languages of the world, clear voice, on all types of music. Hatsune Miku is actually a vocaloïd, a robotic voice that can be built from the Vocaloïd software via a scrolling piano on which we can assign notes and syllables that the robot voice will sing. There are many vocaloids, but the most popular one is Hatsune Miku, who has sung on hundreds of thousands of songs now. Hatsune Miku’s universe is deep, complex, with very different dynamics according to each Vocaloïd Producer and it is in an attempt to understand who Hatsune Miku is, by immersing myself in the bandcamp tags, that I ended up confronting myself with the album Ex Pop Music by Ex Happyender Girl.
What struck me at first is the artwork, a representation of a muted Hatsune Miku that is usually an entity almost always represented cheerful, singing, expressive. Then the second shock is the sound, the songs are built in a rather complex way, with chaotic rhythmic signatures, in a popesque aesthetic but also jazzy and progressive, but what will remain, above all, are the instruments used. Soundfonts, virtual instruments extracted from the chips of consoles and video games, from games of the 16 bits era. If you listen closely, you can recognize a saxophone from the racing game F-Zero, percussion and brass from the role playing game Chrono Trigger, acoustic guitar and keyboard from the role playing game Mother 2.
It is a dense, long, chaotic album that leaves as much room for instrumentation as for the vocal presence of Hatsune Miku. Hatsune Miku is used to being the star of the sound spaces in which she is staged, but this is not the case here, it is a group work. Cicada_sss, the composer of the songs, recalls it on his blog that it is a band, collaborators creating music together. Cicada_sss supports this idea during my interview with him that this is a musical relationship, unlike other Vocaloïd Producers who see Hatsune Miku as their life partner.
The album is quite complex. Pop songs with constant modulations of the tone (as on the track 1 移 民 の 歌), chaotic rhythmic signatures (as on the track 5 に く ば な れ and the 12th レ ッ ツ ゴ ー ハ イ キ〓河 童 橋 途 上 ), jazzy songs with long instrumental and soli phases (as on the track 2 ド レ ス の よ う の 音 楽 は に か ま), depressing ballads with choruses that give the impression of breaking your own face in a staircase (as on the track 4 こんにちは。今日は入浴をご紹介します。あなたは近眼ですか、もしも窓に歩く人がありました。でも、空気清浄機がお安く手に入ります。ジェネリック医薬品を切ってもいい電話 and the 12th 停波（試行中）), rock and metal tunes (as on the 6th 勅令, 7 ビッグ・ブラック・キャット, the 13th 血縁 which goes really really fast), moments really close to cacophonic noise (with the 11th track た の し い 現 代 教 育 and the 14th track 幼 い メ イ ド 愛 好 者 that hurts the brain a little) and quite classic pop titles like the magnificent 9th track 絶 縁 which is a beautiful ear worm to have on an autumn day.
In the end, it is an album with many songs, but rarely longer than three minutes. If you are not very used to listening to soundfonts, the album can tire the ear quite quickly but it has a certain richness in its proposals of compositions and in the search for the use of these virtual instruments.
A strange and gloomy atmosphere emerges from the entire album, very well illustrated by the artwork presenting a mute Hatsune Miku with its grey seal on her face. In the interview, Cicada_sss explains to me that the seal on her face refers to the Jiangshi yokais that are corpses that can be animated and made to do the things that the person who put the seal wants. A Hatsune Miku at the mercy of the “meaning” of others. There is also written on the seal the characters “「」” which symbolizes an opening to dialogue and emphasis but since nothing is written between these two characters, it means that Hatsune Miku is, above all, at the mercy of the lack of meaning. And that with or without meaning, Hatsune Miku will have to sing.
Cicada_sss saw the composition of this album as a demo, the soundfonts used being intended to be replaced later by something else. However, it is the dimension of soundfonts that intrigues me in the essence of this album and that, for me, allows something that few albums composed in partnership with Hatsune Miku allow. Hatsune Miku is an entity that emerges from software and still holds many of its stigmas. While the text-to-speech vocals are still incredibly tinged with a form of awkwardness akin to the Uncanny Valley, the sound quality of Hatsune Miku's voice is much closer to the real thing. However, her attacks, decays, and the texture of her voice make it clear that this is a software voice. This is also what makes it interesting and charming to use. The same goes for the soundfonts and virtual instruments emulated from old machines and video game cartridges. Sharp cuts, undefined attacks, sounds that are repeated without any nuance. A digest of software sounds.
This album is for me a permission to imagine what music sounds like in the software world of Hatsune Miku.
If she is used to go to the analog world and play with artists for analog music, Ex Pop Music allows to create a digital imaginary space where Hatsune Miku plays with these software instruments, immersing us in and living the software space the time of an album. An album emulating analog music in the software world with software tools. This conception of sound space for the listener is allowed by the contextualization of all these elements that constitute this album, instruments coming from software that sound voluntarily like coming from software, just like her voice. It would not be the same if these virtual instruments wanted to be the highest fidelity and realistic to the instruments they emulate. Hatsune Miku's voice would have created a dissonance that would have led to the understanding that Hatsune Miku is visiting our analog world. Here, it is indeed the lofidelization that leads to the emergence of a new space of the imagination, a space that can be considered as inhabited by Hatsune Miku and her instruments, that we only visit through the door of the composition.
If Ex Pop Music is not a voluntary creation of sound space on the part of Cicada_sss, he still tries to emulate an imaginary sound space with the album 21.04.11 which was broadcasted live on Youtube with a visual under the name "still dreaming (hour) vol.0". The album emulates a concert in a rehearsal room, with a spatialization of the amplification points, reverberation and mastering to imitate the narrowness of the place of capture. The instruments are also virtual here, with effects on the guitar and the bass. The album is made of tracks from other albums, rearranged. One recognizes some titles coming from Ex Pop Music, with less instrument but especially a complete vocal rearrangement, a single voice, more serious, with different flights, to try to imitate the voices less produced than on albums.
The emulation of the space is not necessarily done voluntarily by the composers, it was not in the initial intention of Cicada_sss to do it for Ex Pop Music. But tools like instrumentation, spatialization, a particular sound quality, potentially allow whoever hears to make new spaces of the imagination emerge. Ex Pop Music has allowed me to do this. A dimension of the musical imagination to be explored.