Japanese singer - hologram Hatsune Miku (Hatsune Miku) successfully tours the world. Hatsune sings without a backing track, "live" with the help of the Yamaha program vocaloid.
Hatsune Miku is a Japanese virtual singer created by Crypton Future Media on August 31, 2007. To synthesize her voice, the technology of sampling the voice of a live singer is used, namely, the Vocaloid program from Yamaha. Japanese seiyuu Saki Fujita served as the voice donor. It was first released on the Vocaloid2 engine, later added Append (Sweet, Dark, Soft, Light, Vivid, Solid), was also re-released on the Vocaloid3 engine. Discs with Miku's songs won first positions in the Japanese charts. Also, thanks to the technology of laser 3D-holography, she gives live concerts.
Miku Hatsune is 16 years old, with a height of 1 m 58 cm, she weighs 42 kg. The color of the hair and eyes is blue-green. Hatsune Miku's name consists of three words: First (Hatsu), Sound (Ne), and Future (Miku). Approximately it can be translated as "The First Sound from the Future". In order to understand all aspects of the appearance of Miku, you need to understand the fact that at first she appeared as a kind of mascot of the Vocaloid program, and only then, with increasing popularity, she went into “free swimming”, becoming a semi-independent character, nevertheless remaining , Vocaloid mascot.
Hatsune Miku EXPO 2015 in ShangHai Full ver.
The Vocaloid program is essentially a synthesizer of human singing. Initially, it was not popular until Crypton Future Media decided to create an official mascot for the next generation of products (a mascot is any recognizable character that personifies a school, sports team, community, military unit, event or brand). Of course, the mascot from Crypton was supposed to implement the main concept of the company - to sing. Thus, Hatsune Miku was born.
The task of coming up with an image of Miku was given to artist Kei Garo. When Kei took on Hatsune's appearance, his only guidelines were that she was an android and her color scheme should be based on the turquoise color signatures of a Yamaha synthesizer.
Initially, Miku could have various hairstyles, but Kei settled on pigtails after going through various options. Crypton has officially created Miku's "passport". However, it contains only its physical and technical parameters. Crypton specialists decided not to work out Miku's personality characteristics, which allows them to create situational traits that are best suited to a particular song or concert.
Each new voice for the Vocaloid program was created based on the voices of live singers and singers. Those in front of the microphone repeated all the sounds, which the program then had to put together into songs, just like putting together a mosaic of pieces.
But a simple mechanical folding of sounds will not be able to give a good result and "reliable" singing. The Vocaloid program, in addition to pairing sound fragments, can automatically or manually change many voice parameters during the song - from pitch to vibrato. Thanks to this, for example, Vocaloid is able to hit higher notes than the person who gave him his voice.
The initial sales of Vocaloid under the "patronage" of Hatsune Miku's mascot were so high that Crypton's capabilities even lagged behind demand. In the first 12 days of sales, about 3,000 copies of the program were sold.
Globally, this is about one in 250 sales in the music software industry. On September 12, 2007, Amazon.co.jp reported sales of Hatsune Miku totaling 57,500,000 yen, making her the number one software sales of the time.
Hatsune Miku sings only in Japanese, despite this, the singer is becoming popular in the English-speaking world. She, for example, opened for Lady Gaga during her 2014 world tour.
Hatsune Miku & Megurine Luka - Magnet Live in Tokyo Japan
In 2007, a singer was born in Japan who does not cancel concerts due to illness, because she does not get sick at all. All these 10 years she does not eat, does not sleep and at the same time does not get tired. In addition, she works for her creators without receiving royalties, although in the first 5 years of her life alone she brought her owners more than 10 billion Japanese yen, or $ 120.3 million. She performed in the evening show David Letterman on American TV and as the opening act for Lady Gaga, but at the same time does not give interviews and autographs. And she will always be 16 years old. The fact is that one of the most popular (not only in the Land of the Rising Sun, but also in some other countries of the world) pop stars Hatsune Miku created using computer technology. She is a cartoon character, or rather a Vocaloid.
This is the name of virtual performers drawn in the tradition of Japanese anime animation and singing with the help of the computer program of the same name (Vocaloid) developed by Yamaha. Hatsune Miku has about 70 virtual "brothers and sisters": Prima, Sonic, Lily, Merli, Cyber Diva. There is even a vocaloid Katyusha, created so far only as a joke (a video is circulating on the Web where she performs "Katyusha" in Russian with a strong Japanese accent). But the most famous and popular, of course, is Hatsune Miku.
Serious money has been invested in its promotion. Her image is involved in advertising, computer games, animated films, comics, she is sold as a toy doll. The most striking thing is that she gives concerts, which are always sold out. For 10 years, Hatsune gave only 50 concerts around the world. Since she performs infrequently, her concert is always an event for fans.
The performance of the virtual artist is a technically complex spectacle in which the musicians on stage play live musical instruments, and the vocalist Hatsune is projected using 3D projectors onto a screen installed on the stage. The image of the singer is voluminous. The hologram singer does not fake, does not communicate with the audience, but works out the concert like a wound up computer doll. But this does not bother the audience - they applaud her with wild delight. “I think Hatsune Miku's popularity is based on the fact that she can sing in any style (rock, pop, opera, Japanese romances - enka and even amateur songs) and she has a wide vocal range that no living artist in the world has. ", - said" AiF " Japanese woman, employee of the Far Eastern Federal University Yasue Yamana.
Thanks to the availability of the Vocaloid program (the cost of the latest, 4th version is only 10 thousand rubles), Hatsune Miku's repertoire includes 100 thousand songs in various genres. Any person who has mastered the Vocaloid program replenishes the singer's repertoire.
What is Vocaloid?
The Vocaloid program synthesizes a live human voice from vocal fragments taken from live performers - "donors" (or "seiyu" in Japanese - voice actors). "Donors" of voices for Vocaloids can be both popular performers in Japan and Japanese actors known only to a narrow circle. But more often than not, "donors" prefer to remain anonymous. Hatsune Miku gave her voice Japanese voice actress Saki Fujita.
The creators “revived” the pop star as much as possible, in addition to giving her age, even giving her weight and height. She weighs 42 kg and is 142 cm tall. A Japanese user named Negipoyoc has developed a program (MikuMikuSoine) that allows fans to even sleep (not have sex) with Hatsune Miku. All this, of course, is conditional. Only the crazy money that Hatsune brings to the creators and at the same time is not capricious, like living artists, is not conditional. Isn't this the future of show business? The name of the singer stands for: “hatsu” - “first”, “ne” - “sound”, “miku” - “future”, that is, “the first sound of the future”. After all, how convenient - I drew an artist on a computer, recorded his songs using the Vocaloid program and sent a new star on a tour around cities and villages. So what if the artist does not have a soul, but he sings better than any living performers.
The idea of creating a virtual artist is certainly not new. You can recall the film "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" (1988), in which, along with the usual live actors, the cartoon Roger Rabbit "played". Or the sci-fi film Simone (2002) with Al Pacino, where according to the plot the director Taranski with the help of a computer program, he creates a virtual actress Simone, who becomes insanely popular. Will Vocaloids eventually replace living artists if they are more and more popularized and they bring in a lot of money?
First, Hatsune Miku conquered Japan, the conquest of the United States, Mexico and China is next.
Surprised and forgotten?
“People go to the Hatsune Miku show for the same reason they go to see themselves in the twisted mirror ride or ride the Ferris wheel,” said AiF. music producer Leonid Burlakov, who had a hand in the promotion of "Mumiy Troll" and Zemfira. - You can also compare the interest in it with the phenomenon of Tokyo Hotel. There were no songs, but there was a "live alien" that everyone wanted to see. They looked, marveled and ... forgot. And to replace living artists, you need real talent, songs. Since behind this hologram artist are the same composers who first tried to sell their music with live vocalists, and, apparently, it did not work out very well, they decided to use this technology. Another Kurt Cobain(vocalist and guitarist of the Nirvana group) or Zemfira will sweep this pseudo-new technological product out of the minds of the listeners with just one real song.
How to know? After all, there is a show with Michael Jackson in the form of a hologram. Those who did not see the performance of the king of pop when he was alive are happy to go to these performances. Meanwhile, in April 2017, the first vocaloid ballet “Dr. Coppelius" with the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra, where there will not be a single live ballet dancer. Maybe the time will come when any favorite artist can be ordered at home in the form of a virtual hologram. And it will be much cheaper than going to his live concert.
Reading the article will take: 3 min."The hologram was so alive that..."
Have you watched Andrew Niccol's 2002 fantasy Simone, about a virtual simulation of the greatest movie actress in Hollywood history? I watched this picture, I remember being interested and surprised by the possibilities of the film industry of the distant future ... And what would you think - in search of some interesting video in RuNet, I unexpectedly found concert videos of the Japanese hologram singer Miku Hatsune, and her song The world is mine turned out to be very interesting! Miku is the image and voice of the Vocaloid virtual simulator, one of the most popular among the program's fans.
Concert show Hatsune Miky
The development of Vocaloid software was started a couple of years before the release of the science fiction film "Simona" - by 2000, a group of teachers and students from the University of Barcelona had created a mathematical model of signal processing. The university project was funded by Yamaha Corporation, which used its results to create the Yamaha Vocaloid program, officially launched in January 2003.
What is this program? It contains the vocals of several actor's voices capable of performing a song according to the text and melody entered by the user. It should be noted that when selecting voices for the Japanese version of the program, called Character Vocal Series, the company Crypton Future Media, which created it, experienced certain difficulties - singers and singers completely refused to participate in this, fearing that the software would create competition for them on stage. They were reassured by the promise to use only the general characteristics of the voice, not creating its complete imitation - however, the voices of the first project were, to put it mildly, mechanical.
Vocaloid 2 program
The first series of Vocaloids was created in 2004-2006, it included five voice characters - due to their primitive sounding by today's standards, all of them have long been forgotten. A completely different story with the second series of Vocaloid 2, developed from 2007 to 2011 - 22 holographic characters, including Hatsune Miku, who has experienced an upgrade during this time due to her wild popularity among users. By the way, many Miku fans believe that this holographic singer is the first and only vocaloid product. The latest series of Vocaloids on the updated engine, Vocaloid 3, currently consists of nine voice model characters, the number of which can increase - work on the series is ongoing and will continue.
Performers of the Vocaloid 2 program
Let's get back to the best product of the Vocaloid project - Hatsune Miku. The voice of this charming hologram singer was given by Saki Fujita, a Japanese seiyuu actress (a special direction in the preparation of the cast exclusively for the cartoon anime genre). Miku's vocaloid program is mostly intended for the J-pop song genre, however, it allows the performance of songs in other genres. The software character-vocaloid Hatsune Miku owes her special popularity to users of the Japanese resource Nico Nico Douga, who regularly create and publish videos with her participation and performance on the portal. Miku is involved in manga (so I know what it is), in anime, in computer games - she is a full-fledged virtual star. However, this is not the limit of popularity for the vocaloid hologram!
Is it possible for a Vocaloid program to give live concerts, to live music, and gather a serious number of viewers? You think this is nonsense - that's not it, it's all true! Solo concerts by Hatsune Miku took place several times, and in different parts of the Earth - the first appearance in the concert hall on August 31, 2009, full-fledged concerts on March 9, 2010 in Tokyo (Japan), September 18 and October 11, 2010 in San Francisco (USA), October 8, 2010 at the Anime Festival in New York (USA), March 9, 2011 in Tokyo, among other Vocaloids on January 11 and February 12, 2011. Do you think that's all? Figushki - July 2, 2011 Miku Hatsune participated in the anime concert at the venue in Los Angeles (USA), August 16-17, 2011 in Sapporo (Japan), November 11, 2011 in Singapore (Malaysia), March 8-9, 2012 in Tokyo (Japan). Cool, isn't it?
The charm of Miku Hatsune - a girl aged 16, with a height of 158 cm and a weight of 42 kg - does not pass you, the reader of the article. You will be able to personally see the charming hologram at the concert. She (the hologram singer) is unrealistically charming!
I won't lie if I choose between "singing thongs" and Vocaloids - I choose Vocaloids!
In August 2007. Japan has been flooded with new songs and illustrations from the newly-minted virtual star.
A huge boost to the popularization of Miku was given by the appearance in February 2008 of the blatantly free 3-D animation program MikuMikuDance. Now the Internet was filling up with great speed with new video clips with Miku, and, soon, with other Vocaloids.
It was necessary to solve the question of how to bring a virtual star into reality.
Partially, this was implemented on August 22, 2009, but the most popular Vocaloid appeared on the silver screen, and the musicians remained below.
But on March 9, 2010, at a famous concert in Tokyo Miku no Hi Kanshasai 39's Giving Da y, Hatsune Miku was brought on stage after all. Let's see how they did it.
Vocaloid concerts. Visualization
The task was not easy, to place a completely virtual singer among very real musicians. In principle, some developments have already been - a projection on a transparent screen. But live musicians shamelessly shone through the virtual singer, which completely killed the whole illusion of reality.
The following scheme was applied, the projector was left, but several interesting things were done with the screen ....
They put on the stage transparent screen, so that no bright or illuminated objects fall into the field of view of viewers looking at this screen. Placed right behind him translucent spherical screen, onto which the images of the virtual singer were projected.
While the lighting was on in the hall, there was ordinary glass on the stage. But as soon as the light went out, a kind of dark window was formed in front of the audience into the Virtual World in which the Goddess appeared! (Well, at least the fans who happened to be at this concert thought so. I'm sure!)
Now, thanks to thoughtful lighting, real objects did not shine through the projections, and the sphericity of the screen created the effect of pseudo-volume. So there were never any holograms on the stage - there was an ordinary flat projection, embellished with some optical effects.
It should be added that at the first of a series of concerts there was no transparent screen or projector at all. They just used a big plasma panel that they put between the musicians.
It looked something like this:
Then the panel was either broken, or flooded with water, in short, for one reason or another, they switched to technology with projectors.
If we compare these technologies from the side of the audience in the hall, then projection is definitely better for them, since they fully enjoy the effects of pseudo-volume. (For the sake of fairness, it must be said that this effect is far from being distinguishable in the entire hall). But the audience, enjoying the concert on the screen, do not see these subtleties. But the rays from the spotlights of the projector are immediately evident. Let's compare Miku Hatsune on plasma (left screen) and in projection view (right)
One way or another, at the time of writing, the main way to visualize virtual singers is precisely the projection.
In some cases, directors bypass the narrow points of this technology (almost all concerts Magical Mirai), and, sometimes, they sit in a puddle wherever possible (failed).
But the description of modern technologies will be incomplete without mentioning the method augmented reality.
The essence of the method is that the computer, processing the real video, "writes" a virtual performer into it. Actually, the method itself is far from new and has been used hundreds of times to create computer effects in movies. What's new about it is that now the speed of the computer is enough to do this in real time, on the fly.
A little to the right of Eeyore's leg, you can see a mark on the floor - a reference point for a computer that will build the missing image .. And a little behind the dancers - white lines, boundaries that Vocaloid will not cross. As you can see, the effect is amazingly realistic!
There are a couple of pitfalls, the movements in rehearsal must be adjusted in such a way that the dancer and vocaloid do not come into contact. Of course, there will be no reaction of annihilation and a universal explosion, but a virtual singer passing through a live artist will look ridiculous ...
But the most important and offensive thing in this method is that the audience DOES NOT SEE THE PERFORMER ON THE STAGE! All the beautiful image is built only on the monitor screen. Therefore, this method can (and should) be used only for recording clips or concerts in the quasi-Live style (like a live concert), when, despite the presence of a stage and spectators (usually few), everything is sharpened for studio recording.
By the way, starting from 2016, you can often see both a projection (for the audience in the hall) and a computer model (for the viewers) at concerts. In particular, it was exactly that. Unfortunately, in these cases, TV viewers see a forked performer (clearly visible in the screenshots of the Chinese concert), although cameramen try to minimize this effect.
[I decided not to upload the video article, but to use screenshots for illustration, so if you want to watch the original video, go to Youtube using the links below the screenshots]
Vocaloids at concerts. Visualization Perspectives
As a matter of fact, since 2010, when we were shown the so-called “hologram” - a projection, nothing fundamentally new has happened.
Anti-aliasing has improved, the frame rate has increased, the screen has greatly expanded, in some places even two screens have appeared, but the principle remains the same - a two-dimensional projection.
The problem was the lack of technologies that provide the output of a holographic image in free space and the dominance of pseudo-holograms. The famous holograms in cylinders, in fact, are not holograms either. You are simply shown a two-dimensional picture from the side you look at it from.
But not everything is so bad. Salvation comes from the same Japan. Moreover, the problem has been solved since 2006, and in 2011 a working technology for creating an image in free space without a display appeared!
The saviors were National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology— AIST, university Keio And Burton Inc.. (Maybe someone knows their Kawasaki motorcycles). The essence of the method is that laser pulses in the spectrum invisible to the eye, focusing at a certain point in space, transfer air nitrogen atoms to an active state and they emit light.
On the screen on the left, you can see the wing of a butterfly (the butterfly itself is not drawn immediately), which flew at a height of 2 - 3 meters. You can watch a video of a flying butterfly with comments https://youtu.be/GNoOiXkXmYQ (by the way, we kind of cited it).
Of course, the video is not very impressive, but given that it has been 2 years since its publication and these are only the first steps, it is safe to say that the future lies with visualization using holograms in free space. And this future is not too long to wait!
Choreography at a live concert of Vocaloids
How are the dances that Hatsune Miku and other Vocaloids perform during their performances created?
It is clear that a professional choreographer is working, and then?
I am sure that many immediately remembered the program MikuMikuDance and, of course, they were wrong.
The problem is that in order to create a dance manually in this program, you will need a good knowledge of anatomy (“bones” in this program have no physiological restrictions and can be twisted as you like), excellent spatial thinking and very, very much time.
Has long been MikuMikuDance friendly with motion capture sensor Kinnect, but, anyone who has used it will confirm that the capture is very inaccurate, the subtle movements of the fingers are not captured and it will take a little less to edit the motion (dance file for the 3d model) than to create it from scratch.
Therefore, starting from the very first concert, the movements of the model were not programmed, but captured from a live professional dancer using an advanced sensor system.
Consider the process on the example of the complex PERCEPTION NEURON.
The dancer wears a special costume with 32 interconnected sensors. Sensors record the position and movements of the head, neck, shoulders, chest, waist, both hands, fingers of both hands, feet, thumbs of both feet.
The system can send data to a computer via a USB port, via Wi-Fi, or write data directly to a USB flash drive.
The data is processed by the program AXIS Neuron for their correction, correction of possible errors and conversion to most of the most popular formats for managing and developing 3-d models, including for MikuMikuDance.
On the example of the following video, which was created in honor, you can see how the data from the dancer enters the computer, and after the necessary improvements appeared in the final video.
The sensors look like this:
The sensors on the hands and fingers are especially complex:
But all these systems allow you to record movements in a file and then, having processed it on a computer, use it in a concert or video.
The concert is a live action, Miku addresses the audience according to a given program and, as a rule, everything goes more or less normally. But at the ill-fated concert in Kansai, when Miku suddenly lost his voice, the organizers would be very useful feedback
But more recently, a clip got into the network, which went completely unnoticed. Rather, Hatsune Miku simply acted as a DJ.
In fact, it was a test of the system Li-VR, in which the projection of Miku was controlled by a living person in real time. During the show, there was a glitch in the sound and Miku's lively reaction was very welcome!
Thus, in terms of choreography, a breakthrough is planned. Perhaps, very soon, Miku or other Vocaloids (more precisely, those who control the hologram-projection) will communicate with the audience live and adequately respond to unforeseen moments in the hall.
Unfortunately, it all depends on the producers of the concerts and their interest.
P.S. I mentioned that MMD is not used in serious concerts. But individual concerts are held purely under the MMD engine and without the accompaniment of live musicians. A few years ago there was a whole series of concerts Hatsune Appearans.
However, the popularity of these concerts was very low and there is no information about new ones at the moment ...
Illustration above: Dina B
If there are additions or corrections, please leave them in the comments!
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