Interest

Virtual Idol Hatsune Miku to 'Sing in English'

The official Twitter account for Crypton Future Media's Vocaloid2 CV series of virtual singer software confirmed on Thursday that the Facebook account for the Hatsune Miku character has over 39,390 fans. The Facebook account added that the staff will "officially inform that 'Hatsune Miku sings in English' later." Crypton President Hiroyuki Itōh had revealed at New York Comic Con last month that his company is planning a English version of Hatsune Miku, and he asked for 39,390 fans to show their support on Facebook to demonstrate the demand. (The number 39 can be read in Japanese as "Miku" or "thank you" or sankyū.)

Cyberpunk Author William Gibson on Hatsune Miku

In a separate development, William Gibson — one of the earliest authors in the cyberpunk sub-genre of science fiction — posted on his Twitter account on November 10 that "Hatsune Miku doesn't really rock me. I want higher rez, less anime." The artist Hibiki Chikada told Gibson, "Hatsune Miku is repeatedly copied on the net and thus reproducing herself. Infos attached by fans get her higher resolution," to which Gibson replied, "So Hatsune Miku involves some sort of ongoing crowd-sourced evolution?" Other posters explained the phenomenon further to Gibson.

Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" and his first novel, 1984's Neuromancer, influenced science fiction in English and Japanese, particularly in anime and games. (Crypton's Itoh noted that he read Neuromancer 20 years ago.) Gibson has said since the 1980s that modern Tokyo represented and continues to represent the future of human society and technology. He wrote a novel called Idoru about a Japanese virtual idol singer named "Rei Toei" in 1996, although Eve from Megazone 23, Sharon Apple from Macross Plus, and Key the Metal Idol predated the novel. (Coincidentally, in Key the Metal Idol, the title character must gain 30,000 friends to become human.) The same year that Idoru was published, HoriPro debuted the virtual singer Kyoko Date in Japan.

Hatsune Miku in World Media

The Japanese blog Temple Knights has collected YouTube videos of news reports on Hatsune Miku from Poland, Spain, Romania, Mexico, and Brazil:

In the above video, a newscaster for the Polish television news program Panorama reports on a recent 'concert' performed by virtual idol Hatsune Miku. The concert's original production took place in Japan in August 2009 with an audience of over 25,000. The concert has been reproduced in San Francisco and New York.

[Via Temple Knights (link 2, link 3), leetNEET]