It does offer hope that, perhaps in a few years, other speech-synthesis applications such as text-to-speech for screen reading could take advantage of the technology Yamaha has developed. After all, there’s a lot more money in music. But then, you don’t see companies putting the kind of effort into e-book readers that they do into speech synthesizers meant to make music. You don’t see anyone flocking to concerts or writing new works for the voice that reads your e-books in Amazon’s Kindle software. But to me the most interesting thing is the way the star’s become a global singing sensation. The company behind Miku basically mines the best fan-created works to have the character sing “live” in concert, not unlike the way some traditional publishers sign self-published writers to contracts after they prove popular.
She’s opened for Lady Gaga, and played in packed concerts all over the world-and she’s returning for six shows in the USA this year. Hatsune Miku has appeared on the David Letterman show (it’s worth watching the video just to see Letterman’s expression of total bewilderment, which he doesn’t make any attempt to hide). You can buy the software direct from Yamaha’s Vocaloid web store, in fact. Engadget has a lengthy article going into the background of vocaloid fandom, discussing the way her music is effectively crowdsourced by fans all over the Internet who create it using the specialized speech-synthesizer software she’s based on.
A “holographic” character from Japan, she sells out concerts where she “appears” as a motion-captured CGI animation, accompanied by a live band, to sing songs that her fans created on the Internet. Meet Hatsune Miku, a “vocaloid” created by synthesizer company Yamaha. Would it surprise you to know that tens or hundreds of thousands of fans worldwide go to concerts by and participate in a fandom phenomenon around a text-to-speech program?
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