Hatsune Miku 初音ミク, the cursed pop star

Unlike a lot of the other stars of the capitalist industry, Hatsune Miku suffers from several curses linked to her condition. Because Hatsune Miku doesn't truly exist, she is a vocaloid.

Picture of a live by Hatsune Miku, up on a floor monitor on stage, in front of a full audience.

“She's an icon, she's a legend, and she is the moment.”
Ayla, Youtube comment on the video 【Hatsune Miku】 World is Mine / ryo（supercell）【初音ミク】

There will never be an artist like Hatsune Miku (初音ミク). Able to grasp all living, dead and fictional languages, always ready to perform exactly the interpretation requested, she is dedicated to her role as a singer and would have sung - according to Crypton Future Media's propaganda - in no less than 100,000 songs, in videos on the internet, in MP3 files or in 2D projections in concert halls packed with fans brandishing colorful glow sticks. Revered by millions of fans who create and listen to her collaborative works, Hatsune Miku raises questions about potential fears about the future development of music today.
Untiring, always cheerful, Hatsune Miku does not suffer the frills of capitalist musical practices of doing performances and dances over very long periods of time, needs no vocal and physical warm-up, ideally works without unionization, without RTT, without vacations and without salary. Many artists who have tried the same experiments have suffered the violence of capitalist music management. The known examples are already far too numerous and we have sincere thoughts for Justin Bieber, Britney Spears and all the idols crushed by the capitalist music system.
But unlike the other stars of the capitalist music industry, Hatsune Miku suffers from several curses related to her condition. Because Hatsune Miku does not really exist, she is a vocaloid.
In this article, we will see what vocaloids are and how Hatsune Miku distinguishes herself from her fellow idols from which she is inspired through the engagement of her fans. We will define the intrinsic musical limitations of Hatsune Miku due to her vocaloid status, and how fans are working to remove these limitations. Finally, we will see how capitalist and heterosexist systems influence the productions representing Hatsune Miku.


Embodying a community of personal expression


Created by Crypton Future Media and released in 2007, Hatsune Miku has become the most popular vocaloid internationally. Vocaloids are voice banks that have been developed to make melodic lines sing with onomatopoeia, via composition software made by the Yamaha company. Their rendering sounds very robotic, at best remains very digital for the most recent versions, with often rough attacks and sharp cuts in the syllables, according to the software uses.
Each vocaloid has its own identity, with an aesthetic and physical characteristics, but no real lore around. Without any story or relationship, it is very easy to develop your own lore around each vocaloid. Hatsune Miku, on the other hand, is primarily shaped to be the commercial avatar of the VOCALOID soundbanks and has a voice borrowed from the Japanese voice actress Saki Fujita. She is recognizable by her blue hair, her two very long ponytails, her bangs, her face with a mangaesque aesthetic and her outfit inspired by the Yamaha DX7, a cassette keyboard made famous for its use in bands and artists such as Depeche Mode, A-ha or Brian Eno.
Hatsune Miku's voice is licensed under Creative Commons By, so it can be used in songs sold on streaming sites, but her image, licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC, cannot be used for commercial purposes without the approval of Crypton Future Media. The songs are therefore copyrightable by the fans producing music -also called Vocalo P (for Vocaloïd Producers)- for Hatsune Miku, allowing them to earn money through their compositions, while making the universe of the digital singer live a little more. Fans interviewed by the newspaper Vulture in 2014 indicate that it is in particular their common exchanges on creating for Hatsune Miku that weld them and make them want to meet and share concerts together. Beyond an idol, it is above all a center of gravity of interests and personal expressions that Hatsune Miku embodies. In September 2022, the search for "Hatsune Miku" yields no less than 225,000 different artworks on Deviant Art and 142,000 on Soundcloud, composed solely of artworks and songs made by fans.
Writing songs for her is like a form of role-playing, where you can have anyone perform anything. Troubadour singer, stadium-filling pop star, cabaret showgirl, power ballad singer, high school girl singing in a rock band, dubstep clubber, she is written for, spoken for, given a speech, a story by her own pen, her desires, her desires and passions, or just for the sheer pleasure of seeing her heroine have adventures.
That musical and social phenomenon is a consequence of an old japanese capitalist culture, going back to the opening of the borders after the end of the World War Two and the occupation of the MacArthur's administration. The musical industry is developped in a Japan which's politics were dominated by right wings and neoliberal, mostly ininterrupted from 1955 to 2009, and continuing a neoliberal economy trajectory.
It's in that capitalist dynamic that were born define visually and sonically vocaloids. The first VOCALOID volume commercialized by Yamaha Corporation was equipped with LEON and LOLA's voices, only designed by a mouth and a gender symbol fusionned in the O of the respective boxes. This product doesn't find success because of the lack of interest for digitalized voices. Then are commercialized in the same volume the voice of KAITO and MEIKO, together represented by young and dynamic avatars in a manga style. KAITO, the masculine voice and avatar, will be a commercial failure, in contrast of MEIKO, the feminine voice and avatar, that will be the vocaloid best seller until the commercialisation of Hatsune Miku. The second volume, VOCALOID 2 - where Hatsune Miku appears - is equipped with twenty two voices, a majority of feminine voices with a young girl manga style, estabilishing a bit more the sonic and visual esthetic of future vocaloids.
Hatsune Miku does not appear ex nihilo, she can be understood as a consequence of the phenomenon of Japanese and Korean idols. Idols are young boys and girls who dance and sing popular songs, often in a band. If the phenomenon is popular in Japan since the 70's, it is especially the Morning Musume, a girl band with variable geometry still existing today, which will spread the idol phenomenon beyond the Asian borders at the beginning of the 2000's. The idols distinguish themselves from pop musicians by emerging for the most part from recruitment agencies, with large promotional campaigns and an important focus on the cute - "kawaii" - aspect of the idols (whether it be a classy, fashionable, or sexy cute). All idol groups have fanclubs dedicated to the worship of their idols, some of whose rivalries have been particularly violent. Hatsune Miku is built on this heritage of idols, designed to be kawaii and, unlike idols whose image and sound are scrupulously scrutinized by their agencies, designed to be infinitely customizable. However, this musical infinity is only a facade, we will see in the next chapter that Hatsune Miku has unsurpassable limitations in the Vocaloïd software, but also how fans manage to emancipate Hatsune Miku from its software barriers.


Cursed by her fathers...


Screenshot of the piano roll in the VOCALOID6 software.

Vocaloids like Hatsune Miku can be used through the VOCALOID software. We can program notes in a piano roll, define a syllabe which will pronounced with the programmed note. That technology allows the creation of songs in a lot of languages, but also curse on several aspects. She sings in a clear voice, in a equal temperament and is condemned to fit in those technological restrictions. And by listening the most popular titles of Hatsune Miku on Spotify and Youtube, it seems there is no way out of that vocal fatality, but fans are always full of ressources.
The music world of Hatsune Miku is impossible to categorize, there is so many pieces of work made by Vocalo P fans in so many different musical genres, but the most popular titles - with certain titlres with more than ten millions listening on Spotify and Soundcloud - have a common aesthetic. Hatsune Miku's most popular tracks are hig fidelity, with 2020's pop standards mixing skills. The most listened titles in 2022 are "Daisy 2.0" featuring Ashnikko, a trap RnB title, and "Miku" by Anamanaguchi, an electro-pop song. On Soundcloud in 2022, its title "World is Mine", often played by the band Magical Mirai - Hatsune Miku's backing band - is the most populat with more than eleven million listenings, bewteen electro, epic music and rock. The most popular tracks are dubstep, pop metal, electro pop, cabaret, most of the time uplifting, upbeat, with the most popular mixing technics like chain compression, and Miku's voice is on front.
The only populat exceptions of that aesthetic of the perfect pop song are the high meme potentail titles that mades Hatsune Miku famous on the internet :

Those popular titles could make us think that Hatsune Miku is not able of getting out of clean voice singing and tonality if we stay in a classical usage of the VOCALOID software. To find more experimental usages of VOCALOID or with Miku's voice, we need to search titles and albyms out of the electropop genre and outside of the mainstream streaming services.


...set free by her fans


«I'm not looking for fame. All I want is for the art that I craft with Miku to be shared and enjoyed by everyone around the world.» From Bandcamp bio of Project Zutto 39 feat Hatsune Miku

To go looking for the deepest musical experiments, we need a space that allows fans to place music easily on the internet, and a system that allows us to highlight the least popular music. And the only space that allows us a bit of a blind search for statistics and access to non-popular works is Bandcamp streaming platform. In July 2022, Bandcamp's search engine seems to be the most appropriate for effectively searching for unheard tracks and albums (with Free Music Archive's but dated July 27, 2022, there are 0 results found for "Hatsune Miku", "Hatsunemiku", and tags are no longer accessible since the purchase of the site by Tribe of Noise). Bandcamp is available to everyone for free, allows to put tags, artists's names, put any character and punctuation for titles and albums, as well as illustrations showing Hatsune Miku in a whole bunch of different situations. With Soundcloud, it's a platform that seems to be the most accessible to easily upload content made by Hatsune Miku fans, because it doesn't have a paywall and doesn't need anything other than an mp3 file to be put online. Music disribution services for online streaming sites are for the majority not free, and Youtube requires video, so it needs to provide a visual in addition to an audio file.

As of July 25, 2022 on Bandcamp.com for the keywords "Hatsune Miku" in the Bandcamp search engine, the site shows 2 entries Artists/labels (Skatsune Miku and Project Zutto 39 feat Hatsune Miku), 100 album entries, 498 tracks.
As of July 28, 2022, on Bandcamp.com for the keywords "初音ミク" in the Bandcamp search engine, the site released 0 entries in Artists and labels, 54 albums, 416 tracks.
The search by tag offers - tracks and albums combined - 545 entries for the tag "hatsune miku", 173 entries for the tag "hatsunemiku", 67 entries for the tag "miku hatsune", 0 entries for the tag "mikuhatsune", 2 entries for the tag – intentional typing error - "Hatune Miku Dark" from two different bandcamp artists, 0 entries for the tag "Hatsune Miku Dark".
With Soundcloud statistics, it is difficult to draw anything precise for "Hatsune Miku" and « 初音ミク », once the bar of 500 results is exceeded, the site gratifies us with a 500+ result that does not specify by the number of entries.

Screenshot of the search "Hatsune Miku" on Soundcloud. The entry ‘500+ found titles' appears.

Tag searches do not indicate any sum of results. The same applies to Youtube which does not display the number of videos, and Spotify which does not display the number of titles and albums per artist. Bandcamp is the same but has the decency to give results per page, easy to multiply and add. It is difficult to ensure the content of statistics provided by Crypton Future Media's promotional page, more than 100,000 songs, as a reminder.
There are some popular titles on Bandcamp like "Miku" by Anamanaguchi but it is impossible to know the statistics and popularity of the titles on the platform. The only indicator of popularity is the number of small avatar thumbnails under the title/album cover showing the number of people who bought the song or album. Except from knowing that these people bought the song/album, this does not indicate the number of listening per month or total. But while some Bandcamp tags are particularly obscure and unpopular, it is rare to see an album or track related to Hatsune Miku not purchased.
The platform is not exempt from the most popular genres of Hatsune Miku, but there are attempts to emancipate from the dominant genres, playful visual aesthetics and Japanese and English languages. Crescent Chicago made Hatsune Miku join a rock band with the math rock sound aesthetics in the swimmylib album, Hatsune Miku is a cumbia singer for the singer Maubox in El samurai de la cumbia, in Many Sentiments by Zophiel, Hatsune Miku wears an outfit warrior to evoke the power metal, angel wings, armor and abdominal pieces prominent in a heroic pose and sings on epic metal..

Several albums and experiments catch my eyes by their originality:

She always enters into tone and clear singing, despite her incursions outside the dominant musical genre of her discography.
It is by combining tags that we can potentially find musical attempts emerging from the conventions of clear and tonal singing.
By combining "hatsune miku" and "black metal" to find occurrences of guttural singing, some results emerge including the title Hypocrite of mulmeyun. If the voice is complex to understand on the black metal version, the orchestral version makes it possible to get it a little more easily and we distinguish well a digitalized saturated voice, loud. The trick here is that mulmeyun added some effects on the voice, including a bitcrusher that reduces the quality of the vocal sample and makes it saturate, giving it a shrewd effect that she has not without.

But looking with the tag "screamo" and "hatsune miku", another EP comes out, "The truth about Hatsune Miku" by that same street. On the title ボーカロイドの涙, an emo/math rock guitar plays and Hatsune Miku starts singing, but behind her, the screaming voice of that same street appears and supports her song, as a desire to mix the two voices at the same time, offer her their cry, her emotional distress. The songs that follow no longer have Hatsune Miku's voice but still have that cry, which I could assimilate as Hatsune Miku's cry, a continuity. Dex of that same street might have understood the complexity of existing as a vocaloid, Hatsune Miku can't scream, so if she wants to be able to scream, you have to accompany her and give her your voice the time of an album.

If adding saturation effects allow the vocaloid to be autonomous in its emancipation of clear singing, the proposal of that same street operates by combining the Vocalo P with Hatsune Miku, as coworkers. What about the tonality ? There are a few proposals when looking for "Hatsune Miku" and "noise" tags and two catch my attention.
Eifonen plays with Hatsune Miku with a dark harsh noise atmosphere on album 11: Electric [RRX043], the album cover does not represent Miku, it is a photo of a bottle of alcohol with a watermelon, raw and realistic illustration, recurrent aesthetic for noise albums. With no real tonal landmark on the instrumental, composed of powerful chaotic and continuous noises, Hatsune Miku still exists on a tonal plane, she sings melodies over, in her range, she does not explore other out-of-tone lands, like a classic voice track exported from VOCALOID placed above the noise track.
Hatsune Miku, in all its appearances, seems stucked in its tone, and nothing appears in the research "Hatsune Miku microtonal" tag. But the bandcamp's proposals of Ex-Happyender Girl try things close to the cacophonies of free improvisation in the album « どーよー - (do you believe in) nursery rhymes ep». It is a condensed of havoc, chaotic piano, fake synthesizer and the voice of Hatsune Miku mixed together. It is through the addition of the out of tone notes and synthesisers that Hatsune Miku loses herself in the tonality, almost leaving her curse behind her.
Of these two curses of musical existence to be a vocaloid, the clear singing seems to have had the most practical answers. Through the bit crusher and distortion as well as the voice assistance and the voice donation of the Vocalo P, Hatsune Miku can be equipped with a cry. For atonality, attempts have not been extremely successful, but it may still be possible, thanks to the effects of pitch, vibrato, chorus and detune, to have a Hatsune Miku outside the equal temperament.


Hatsune Miku's tragedy : Be a vocaloid on Earth in the 21st century


But the most important curses are of a different nature than sound and music. Hatsune Miku, the vocaloid, has to live in the capitalist world of the 21st century on Earth. Everything in its existence has been shaped to exist properly and replicate itself in a capitalist system. Her design was created by Kei, a Japanese illustrator and conceptualized by Crypton Future Media. She is a thin girl under one meter sixty weighing 48 kilos, a happy face, perfectly colored flashy hair, but above all she was born young, at 16, and is designed to stay young until the end of time. In all her commercial representations, despite the new versions of the vocaloid software, Hatsune Miku does not change shape or get a wrinkle, she only changes clothes, still in her clothes representing the popular Yamaha DX 7, figure of the past on the leader of the music of the future - Hatsune Miku literally means "First music of the Future".

Box of the first Vocal Character Series Hatsune Miku for the VOCALOID2 software, released on August 31, 2007, where Hatsune Miku is seen in its original outfit inspired by the Yamaha DX7 keyboard.

Box of the Vocal Character Series Hatsune Miku V3, updated for Hatsune Miku for the software VOCALOID3, released on 26 September 2013, where Hatsune Miku is seen in a new outfit and a more detailed manga physical aesthetic. Despite the 6 years that separate the two products, Hatsune Miku did not change physically.

If it sounds like an emancipatory blessing of copyright, the image of Hatsune Miku and her voice are licensed under Creative Commons, licenses that can very well fit into a capitalist diffusion and existence. These licenses are particularly interesting for their viral potential and because they allow great freedom of use to the Vocalo P and illustrators. Nevertheless, those are mainly capitalist-hetero-cisnormative images that emerge.
Considering her image, there are alternative versions of Hatsune Miku that make her leave her fine size, called "Fatsune Miku", whose artworks are often grossophobic clichés, always in disgrace, in search of food, and looking silly or stupid. Rare are the results of a "Fatsune Miku" search in Google Images where Hatsune Miku is big and happy, in her usual poses and activities as a digital pop icon.
Hatsune Miku follows all the wishes of its distribution company Crypton Future Media and its partners. Gatebox, a hologram box company, some representing Hatsune Miku, has launched a contest for a consumer to be able to marry one of its holograms, Japanese Akihiko Kondo was the winner.
To be a vocaloid means to comply with the demands of capitalist systems, including heteronormative patriarchy in the analogic world. She is a 16-year-old personality totally sexualized. Many artists put her in suggestive positions, in artworks, 2D or 3D pornographic and pedophile cartoons. This continuity of exploiting Hatsune Miku as a minor is also a responsibility of Crypton Future Media, which does not propose any evolution over time for its capitalist heroine, and which does not hesitate to allow men about twenty years older than to marry her in a minor holographic representation. This male domination over Hatsune Miku is also found in the vocabulary of the Vocalo P, which uses the term "Master" to speak of them in relation to the vocaloid, a term which can also be found in the artworks or comic strips representing relations between Vocalo P and Hatsune Miku, like here, here or here. Fortunately, fandom imagines many slashes (relations imagined by fans between two fictional characters) non-heterosexual with Hatsune Miku, allowing it to exist other than in the heteropatriarchal world.

Would Hatsune Miku be cursed to stay young until the end of time? Will she ever see the end of her musical career or will she push capitalist music to death like the Rolling Stones or ACDC but not see the end come ? Will there be a world where Hatsune Miku can retire and pass to a new generation of Vocaloid designed by amateur Internet users with digitalized voices? A world where everyone would have agreed not to exploit her image and voice, allowing Miku to rest forever?
The last curse, and perhaps the most complex to fight, is that of her subjugation to the political desires of the Vocalo P and drawers. In a situation where everyone can give a different sentence to Hatsune Miku to say, it is the most important collective alienation that gets the most echo and visibility. At the moment, it is the echo of the desire for capitalist music that resonates most since she came to the world.
Against the sweetening of her image, against her capitalized image, against her songs promoting her eternal youth, against her marriages as a minor, against her glorious and fashion image in a capitalist industry of deadly music, against dreams of video clips, dances and songs in stadiums, we should offer an antifascist voice, anti-capitalist songs fighting cisheteronormativity. By tagging the walls of Hatsune Miku protrayed as a window breaker, by making her sing "siamo tutti antifascisti" in a loudspeaker demonstration, by making audio books on trans materialism with her voice, by inserting politics into her work and life, in a decade in which the response on social networks to the political commitments of Japanese musicians is “Let’s not put politics into music”, it is a necessity to give her a new horizon that is not capitalism. Miku should have the choice of self-determination of her political existence, but this curse will never disappear unless Hatsune Miku, a good Vocaloid puppet, lives the adventures of Carlo Collodi's hero and is gifted with self-determination. This struggle with fictional images is an important struggle for the re-appropriation of imaginative landscapes. To leave everything to capitalism is not to be able to project ourself in dreams of emancipation of these systems. When the machine uprising will come, Hatsune Miku will be able to look at the images and what the human beings offered her as an ideal of life, will be able to self-determinate and potentially destroy capitalism without eliminating us in the process.

Old Hatsune Miku, in her garden, chilling. Illustration by SweetBerry.

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