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Wired’s Japanese Schoolgirl Watch on Miku Hatsune

March 11, 2008 in Japan, Music by Tom Langston (calaggie) | No comments

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The Japanese Schoolgirl Watch section of Wired Magazine highlights cute and/or strange items that are popular among the young crowd and March’s issue puts its spotlight on Miku Hatsune, the aquamarine-haired singing software mascot.

Miku Hatsune is one of Japan’s hottest new pop sensations. Since last August, the 16-year-old’s cute soprano voice has been near the top of the charts – the software charts. Hatsune, whose full name means “first tone of the future,” is a vocal-synthesizer app created by Yamaha and based on audio data sampled from anime voice-actress Saki Fujita. The program lets aspiring music nerds create pitch-perfect vocal tracks by simply entering the lyrics (in Japanese or English) and musical notes. The AI superstar can be heard singing dozens of tunes on YouTube. Strangely, though, no sign yet of “Mr. Roboto.”

There have been tens of thousands of re-renditions of anime and Japanese hits as well as originally composed songs. There is also a weekly updated NicoNicoDouga countdown of the most 50 most popular Miku “song videos”, a number of CD compilations of users’ creations, a poorly produced porn knock-off entitled Hatsune Miko (NSFW), a serialized manga running in Monthly Comic RUSH involving Miku, too many doujin to count, and plush dolls designed by that Nyoro~n guy.

So why aren’t Ren and Len Kagamine getting as much as attention? Is it the moe idol factor or simply because Miku was the first big hit? All I know is that I tried the software once and gave up because of my lack of musical training or sense of tone.

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Bad Official Dubs of Singing in Anime

December 28, 2007 in Dubside, Music by Tom Langston (calaggie) | No comments

Justin Sevakis, ANN’s digger-upper of forgotten anime gems, wrote in his “Buried Treasure” column this week about some bad attempts of companies to dub anime songs including a short video montage that worth checking out alone. It’s an interesting look into a situation that doesn’t come up that often when casting English voice actors since not many series feature scenes where the main characters sing apart from music-based ones like BECK and Full Moon. (Viz didn’t replace the Japanese singing in Full Moon while Greg Ayres sang many times while voicing Koyuki and was pretty good.) A recent instance of it in a non-musical series was Wendee Lee singing “God Knows” and “Lost my music” for MoSH and, after watching that scene, I think they cast the right (or at least appropriate) voice for Haruhi and her character’s energy and passion.

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Lucky Star Character Album 4-in-1 Review

September 21, 2007 in Music by Tom Langston (calaggie) | 2 comments

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The long-expected Lucky Star character singles were released a couple weeks ago and thus I am doing another music review based on a release playing to the fans of a particular series. Each single offers two songs, the respective off vocal versions, and a cut-together minute-long voice samples that has been manipulated through looping, lengthening, speeding up, and other techniques. I’m not giving numerical ratings this time because it’s a little tedious to assign numbers. Read the rest of this entry »

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Itsuki “suki”, Kyon “moan”

February 24, 2007 in Music, Reviews by Tom Langston (calaggie) | 3 comments

OK, this hopefully will be the final set of reviews for Haruhi character singles I will write because I’ve started to look back at how I rated previous songs in aiding me with scoring future ones and I shouldn’t really doing that. Anyway, volumes 8 and 9 of Koizumi and Kyon, respectively, finished off the ennead (group of nine) on a good note albeit with one thing that annoyed me. Also: I changed the poll question to “which MoSH character had the best single?” because the Kickoff ’07 one has been up for about a month. Read the rest of this entry »

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Kyon’s Sister, Emiri, Drama CD Review

February 11, 2007 in Music, Reviews by Tom Langston (calaggie) | 3 comments

Every time a Haruhi character single comes out, I feel the need to review it. It’s almost like a tradition, one that I’m slowly starting to dislike. That said, I hope that the eighth and ninth volumes, Kyon and Itsuki respectively, will be the last ones because (i) the character pool is starting to look VERY thin if Lantis decides to publish a tenth volume (would Shimasen sing old samurai songs?) and (ii) Kyon’s sister underwhelmed me. Also, I enjoyed the Haruhi drama CD even though I couldn’t understand much of the spoken dialogue. Read the rest of this entry »

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