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J-fans probably know what a “Hatsune Miku” is by now – you may even be thinking “No! It’s ‘who’ Hatsune Miku is!”
To commemorate the CG idol’s sixth birthday (since her original release in 2007) – and the release of “Hatsune Miku V3 English” – we met up with her dad. Meet Hiroyuki Ito, founder of Crypton Future Media Inc. – the creators of Hatsune Miku.
MTV 81 managed to catch up with one of the most forward-thinking people in Japan at this year’s Japan Expo Paris, to talk about Hatsune Miku the software, the singer, and the muse. Also, since meetings with Ito are so rare, we just had to ask him about his vision of the future – of music, and everything.
Firstly, congratulations on Hatsune Miku’s sixth birthday! And of course the release of “Hatsune Miku V3 English.”
Thank you. You know, it’s been a complicated time – both a long and short ride, but in the six years since Miku’s debut, we’ve been able to go through some trial and error, and successfully manage to create a scene. I think it’s about time we took the next step, both in a technical sense and also as a company; to continue digging but in at a different angle.
And of course we are going to expand and establish the Miku movement. To put it in bigger words, to continue creating the future – not just to provide a place for people to integrate content, but to make a positive future.
In Japan, there’s a real sense of a hybrid of traditional culture and technology. I hope that Miku will help make things exciting for Japan, and its industry, the starting point of so much technology. I think that from now on we need to focus more on looking forward, to create a better future.
That sounds like a grand vision. Did you have that in mind when Crypton Future Media was established in 1995? Or did it come to you as you went along?
I had a vague vision even back in ’95. Now I am trying to fill in the gaps, not to leave them as they are. As I’m now at the position to make a difference, I think it would be fascinating to take the direction to make a future ourselves.
That’s how we created and introduced Hatsune Miku to the world, and have been trying to keep her growing. I think that we’ve been able to create some ripples, and now we have to think about the next step.
Was it your intention to eliminate the human voice from music production?
That isn’t my intention. Ultimately, Vocaloid is not to replace the human voice, but rather more of a synthesizer. I think its charm lies in the imperfectness – sometimes sounding really machine-like adds to the “personality” of the voice. It wouldn’t be attractive if it could perfectly imitate the human voice.
Wakamura P, visual creator for many of the Hatsune Miku videos and self-proclaimed idol fan, says that Hatsune Miku is an “ideal idol.” What do you think about that?
There are many different values and ways of thinking, so if there are 1,000,000 users then there should be 1,000,000 different ways of thinking.
I try not to be too fixed to certain values; I think more ways of thinking lead to richer and more diverse creation. The important thing is to be multi-faceted – that’s where evolution starts. Hatsune Miku has become a hub for a variety of creation, such as music, moving images and other kinds of technology.
Voice synthesizer technology has had a pretty huge impact on the music production scene in Japan. Is Vocaloid, and your work at Crypton, an evolution in music production?
I think it is. It started as a technology that was intended to substitute for the human voice, but I think it’s going to have significant effects, such as the invention of the word processor, which in turn enabled people to instantly share the same information as printed texts – but in a musical sense (smiles).
Now, with the release of the English version of Hatsune Miku, with improvements in the interface, it’s going to be a standard tool for creators to make music, with more people using it. With that, there will be more types of music being created, with unpredictable, totally unique uses of Miku.
So I don’t know what is going to happen next, but I believe that this is a kind of music revolution, and we would like to keep contributing to this revolutionary technology.
So how do you plan to take the revolution to English-speaking countries?
Culture differs between each country. In Japan, “sub-culture” is becoming really popular – in many cases it’s almost mainstream. Just as with music, popular genres are different; in the U.S. and Europe, it is probably EDM, and post-rock before that.
So that could be the key point of the success: Who uses Hatsune Miku, and what kind of music they support.
We’ve heard that she might collaborate with international acts… Would you like to comment on that?
Hatsune Miku is perceived differently in each country. Once Miku is misunderstood, that could become the default.
Unfortunately she is mistaken very often, especially abroad. I saw some people commented their disgust for a Hatsune Miku concert video on a video-sharing site – but I’m sure we can get empathy if presented properly, that Miku is a symbolic event in which hundreds of thousands of artists and creators are taking part in and contributing to.
There are people uncomfortable with the idea of a virtual artist, so it doesn’t work to simply show concert visuals to them. We have to introduce her with care. That’s our intention – to create solid entry points for her in each country and their cultural spheres by collaborating with their artists and making connections.
Is there any way you might want to see Hatsune Miku used in other countries?
What we Japanese people find interesting about Miku and what people all over the world do must be totally different.
I think it’s more important what they would want to see rather than what we would. So I don’t have any clear idea for now – and I can’t even imagine what would be accepted and supported in different cultures. It’s almost scary to think!
Hatsune Miku has been used by some of Japan’s leading experimental creators such as Isao Tomita and Keiichiro Shibuya. The term “muse” has been used for Miku before – is she a muse for you too?
(Smiles) I guess she is. Hatsune Miku is content that has many inputs and outputs, creating a base for people to create any number of productions through her. The software has been updated very often, but we hadn’t planned a particular strategy in the first place. More like “Oh, this is how it turned out, so in that case we have to do it that way.”
When it comes to inputs and outputs, all we can do as providers of the technology is improve the user policy, since we’re not actually in the position to create content by ourselves. It’s been a really stimulating learning curve; we’ve been inspired to work on increasing the number of outputs through what we’ve realized over the years.
Looking forward to more! So, the word “future” is even in your company’s name – we’d love to hear your vision for the future of Hatsune Miku, and in general really!
It’s only been about 20 years since most people started using computers. And now they’re completely integrated into our lives. Now we share massive amounts of information through what we now call “the Net” on liquid crystal displays, and update news on a real-time basis.
And that’s just what’s happened over the past 20 years; if you think about the span of the next 20 years, and then the next 50, or 100 years into the future, we’re really just at the starting point. It’s only been a moment since the invention of the computer, and the real impact may only be realized several decades, or maybe centuries from now.
I imagine that by that time there will also be developments in our body construction. For example, we wear clothes now; it’s a matter of course. But that’s why our body hair has decreased significantly as a result of evolution or degeneration in a sense – we can’t live naked anymore.
Tell us more! Where do computers come into the picture?
Computers are an extension of the human brain. So I think it would be best to develop our artistic instincts, or something related to specific judgments instead, because those are what computers can’t do. We should only work on those things and get rid of the functions we don’t need, and leave the rest to computers.
In the past, there have been two major jumps in the course of human evolution. Firstly, agriculture made drastic changes to the human lifestyle. Then the information revolution – but we can’t measure the impact of that one quite yet. I believe it’s clear that the revolution is happening and molding our lives, even if it takes a span of several decades or centuries.
Memorization, or calculations such as “1 + 1” wouldn’t be important, that’s what computers can do a better job at, so we must improve what computers can’t do – what makes us human. That’s what distinguishes human brains from artificial ones. It’s vital because it’s us who are going to imagine our lifestyles and technology in the distant future.
We are in the process of that right now, and Hatsune Miku could be deeply involved in it, that’s my idea of creating a future. It’s not just narrow-scoped talk about changes in the music industry – we are in a bigger wave of change and evolution, and I don’t want to miss the chance to contribute to this movement.
But I don’t know exactly about the near future, the next two or three years – I guess that’s a matter of little adjustments.
Source: MTV81
Source article written by Mark Jarnes
