Supercell's Supercell featuring Hatsune Miku

Abstract

The lead singer on Supercell’s eponymous first album is Hatsune Miku—a Vocaloid character created by Crypton Future Media with voice synthesizers. A virtual superstar, over 100,000 songs, uploaded mostly by fans, are attributed to her. Supercell is a Japanese creator music group with the composer Ryo leading ten artists, who design album illustrations and make music videos. These videos are uploaded onto Niconico and other video-sharing sites. By the time Supercell was released in March 2009, the group’s Vocaloid works were already well-known to Niconico users and fans. This book explores the Vocaloid and DTM (desktop music) phenomena through the lenses of media and fan studies, looking closely at online social media platforms, the new technology for composing, avid fans of the Vocaloid character, and these fans’ performative practices. It provides a sense of how interactive new media and an empowered fan base combine to engage in the creation processes and enhance the circulation of DTM works. 33 1/3 Global, a series related to but independent from 33 1/3, takes the format of the original series of short, music-basedbooks and brings the focus to music throughout the world. With initial volumes focusing on Japanese and Brazilian music, the series will also include volumes on the popular music of Australia/Oceania, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and more.

“Wrap You Up in My Blue Hair”: Vocaloid, Hyperpop, and Identity in “Ashnikko Feat. Hatsune Miku – Daisy 2.0”

“…However, Miku's official image does have strong consistency: she has a waifish appearance, and among the scant details Crypton gives about her background, her age is listed as sixteen (Condry 2018). While many of Miku's fan-producers are faithful to this image, her identity is also subject to their whims, as evidenced by the fact that Miku's image has also been sexualized or used for pornographic content (McLeod 2016;Yamada 2017). This paper differs from previous studies on Vocaloid in its focus on a cross-genre and cross-cultural collaboration involving Hatsune Miku.…”

“…While the rights to any commercial use of Miku's voice and likeness (designed by Japanese artist KEI) are owned by Crypton, anyone with access to the Vocaloid software can create songs, and even accompanying visual performances, for Miku. Making music with Miku has become its own cottage industry, and fan-produced performances, which circulate on video sharing platforms like YouTube and its Japanese equivalent NicoNico, are foundational to her development as a music persona (Yamada 2017). As Miku's popularity has grown on account of these fan creations, she has gained international exposure, even opening for Lady Gaga during the North American leg of her 2014 ArtRave tour (Bell 2016).…”

Popular Music, Technology, and the Changing Media Ecosystem

“…In order to establish a point of reference for young people to identify themselves with the cassette format, VSI utilizes so-called ambassadors. The first one in 2017 was the virtual anime-character mascot of the Vocaloid software Hatsune Miku, a voice-synthesizing program which is used in current music production (see Yamada 2017). Miku, portrayed as a scrawny teenage girl with long blue hair, has developed a cult status in anime fan circles with adaptations in fanfiction and art.…”

Why Play When You Can Watch or Listen? Multi-Modal Engagements in Digital Gaming

“…From the socially charged performances of Damon Albarn's Gorillaz to the cheery imagination of Youtube's Kasune AI, our modern age sees music becoming coproduced (Lin et. al, 2020) and presented (Yamada, 2017) by 'virtual musicians'. are musicians who either in production or representation are framed through the navigations of autonomous, digital performing agents.…”