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| Hatsune Miku |
Hatsune Miku is the name of a Voice Bank for Crypton's Vocaloid software. Her name roughly translates into "First Sound to the Future" according to the Vocaloid Wikia site. She's also called 'Miku Hatsune' by some English fans, considering that in Western cultures the surname goes last. As opposed to Japan and some other European countries.
"The name of the title and the character of the software was chosen by combining Hatsu (初, first), Ne (音, sound), and Miku (未来, future) thus meaning "the first sound to the future."
- Vocaloid Wikia.
She was the first released in the Vocaloid 2 series, and to this day remains possibly the most 'well-known' Vocaloid character. Her release took Vocaloid from obscure software to household word.
Her voice was sampled from Japanese Voice Actress Saki Fujita (藤田 咲). Her character art, seen here, was drawn by Japanese illustrator KEI. Compared to her Vocaloid 1 predecessors Kaito and Meiko, Miku's voice achieved a level of realism that was very nearly unparalleled. Many people mistook her for a real singer, or an anime character.
While Miku is commonly used to sing J-Pop style songs, she can be used for other purposes. Examples of her songs have literally flooded Youtube and its Japanese counterpart "Nico Nico Douga".
Miku also sang the opening theme to the recently released "Black Rock Shooter" Anime by Huke. Before the series was announced, many people thought that Black Rock Shooter was simply a fan-made Vocaloid character. This may be because both of them have the same hairstyle, two long pigtails. BRS is actually an Original character, totally separate from Vocaloid.
Over time, dedicated fans of Miku have created fanart, doujin and fanfiction of her and the other Vocaloids. Because Crypton never gave much data on Miku's personality, the fans have attempted to fill in the blanks. She's most often portrayed as a sweet, caring individual who loves to sing. She is also shown repeatedly with a leek (a type of Onion), and has therefor been heavily associated with the 'Leekspin' meme.
Also notable is 'The Disappearance of Hatsune Miku'. The song is thought by some to be derived from an incident on October 18th, 2007, where images of Miku could not be found anywhere on Google/Yahoo image search. Both companies were accused of censorship. They stated that this was the result of a 'bug' which affected other keywords as well. Not just Miku. The so called 'bug' appeared to be fixed as of October 19th. Miku re-appeared in the search results.
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