The World Is Hers: How Hatsune Miku Is Changing Everything - Part II

Crypton was founded in 1995, a time when even MP3 was still an infant technology, YouTube was a decade away, and the idea of anthropomorphizing everything with cute anime girls was yet to take off. "Our goal was not originally to work with Vocaloid or to create a [voice synthesis] software," says Itoh. "Crypton was set up as a company that works with sound in general—any software that has to do with sound."

If Itoh is jokingly called "Miku's father," then her grandparents are the folks at YAMAHA, who unveiled the original Vocaloid engine in 2003. "We knew that such a technology existed, and wondered if there was anything we could do with that," says Itoh about the early years. "We already had an existing relationship with YAMAHA, so we were able to contact them and create a product out of it."

But it's not as if Miku just descended from the heavens as a fully formed synthesized singing angel. Her roots can be traced back to some very humble forms of sound technology, as Itoh explains. "In Japan, [voice synthesis] software is reasonably popular and is used in places such as train stations, where trains may be announced, or [on board] when the train station is being called. Telephones might have an answering system that is driven by Vocaloid." (Imagine that: one of Miku's relatives is the dreaded robo-phone that works the customer service hotline).

"At first, there was no software that worked with a [synthesized] singing voice," Itoh continues. "I wasn't sure how much need there was for such a software. Or, for that matter, what merit there would be in creating a software that could make a PC sing."

It was that uncertainty that guided Itoh's next move—ultimately one of the smartest moves in Crypton's history. "In 2004, I created our first [Vocaloid] software, Meiko, and attached a cartoon character to it. I did that because a software that [simulates] a person singing is not an essential need to human beings. I figured, in order for it to appeal to people and be loved by people, it needed to have a human touch, and something like a cartoon character was the right tool for that. It had a reasonable amount of success, and of course that led up to the concept of Hatsune Miku."

And everyone knows what happened next.

Maybe the secret of Hiroyuki Itoh's success is that, as Crypton's founder, he is more a business person than a music, sound engineering, or even software person. Itoh laughs when asked if he is a musician at all (he's not), then admits that he majored in Economics. "Nothing to do with sound," he says. "I guess that, in successfully marketing Vocaloid, I did use some of the skills I learned."

At his keynote speech on Day 1 of Anime Expo, Itoh puts on his businessman hat as he breaks out a formal slideshow presentation about Hatsune Miku and the cult of Vocaloid. He provides the customary rundown about who he is and what his company does, then goes over the list of official Crypton-produced Vocaloid "characters" (or, to be technically correct, software packages).

Hatsune Miku, the eternal 16-year-old born on August 31, 2007, remains the star of the show to this day. Second to her in popularity are the Kagamine twins, Rin and Len, whose distinctive yellow trim and boy/girl pairing are almost as ubiquitous as Miku's green-and-gray on the cosplay circuit. But the most versatile voice, from a music producer's perspective, is that of Megurine Luka, a 2009 product who boasts a deeper range and the ability to "sing" in both Japanese and English. Some fans also wave an old-school flag for Meiko and Kaito, whose voices were built on an earlier generation of Vocaloid technology but are still core members of the Crypton family.

Non-Crypton Vocaloid characters have also entered the subculture, such as Megpoid, based on voice samples of seiyuu Megumi Nakajima and modeled after Macross F's Ranka Lee, and Gackpoid, built on the voice of J-rock superstar Gackt. Other enterprising souls have even developed an open-source synthesis engine called Utauloid (from the Japanese word utau, "to sing"), the most famous of which is the pink-and-curly-haired Kasane Teto.

It may feel strange at first to talk about music software packages as if they were real people. But just as Itoh predicted when he first created them, that's exactly what has made them so appealing. The inspiration that these characters provide has resulted in 366,000 Vocaloid-related videos on YouTube and 92,600 such videos on NicoNico, a statistic that Itoh proudly shows off in his presentation.

The Piapro collaboration workflow.

Then there is the multimedia spillover that has resulted from this growing meta-genre. The Crypton-owned website Piapro (an abbreviation for "Peer Production"), features over 450,000 Vocaloid-inspired creations in word, sound, and image. Even more remarkable is how creators inspire each other: under a shared-content policy, one Piapro user might produce a song, then another will listen to it and draw an accompanying illustration, and yet another might run with the concept and produce a short animated video. All that matters is that the originator is properly credited under the site's rules.

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