Virtual Singers: A History

 by Rowan Reddy

ABBA is timelessly popular, but especially right now. Even I, having listened to about three ABBA songs in my lifetime, know about their latest musical triumph - the ABBA Voyage. The four-member Swedish rock band, having last played a live gig in 1979, have now been transformed by teams of 3D animators into virtual avatars (or ‘ABBAtars’) of themselves to tour around the world one last time. You might think this sounds insane or futuristic, a novel new concept just beginning to take off, but that's where you would be wrong. Virtual singers, in their diverse mediums, shapes and sizes, have been capturing the minds of audiences since the 1960s. This is just another moment in their decades-spanning career. 

I’ll start this story with a band that likely doesn't spring to mind when you think of virtual singers: the Beatles. Five years after their band first formed, a cartoon starring exaggerated depictions of the members began airing on ABC in the United States. Each episode was named after one of the Beatles’ songs, and had stories based on the songs’ lyrics. This was a novel idea - due to the popularity of the band, and the ease with which they could be recognised, the show was a great success. This idea of a persona being adopted by a singer when they were performing was by no means a new concept at the time, but the idea of band members’ stage personas almost becoming different people from the musicians themselves was. Disconnecting music from those who make it was a goal that many musicians strove to achieve, and with the first synthesiser, the Moog Synthesiser, invented four years after the Beatles’ formation, this goal was becoming ever closer. 

Next, in 1970, came Kraftwerk. Their band, notoriously reclusive yet wildly successful, popularised the electro music genre with their fully synthesised songs and monotone voices speaking repetitive lyrics in German. Their concerts were surreal, with mannequins or robots often taking the places of the singers. Even if they were actually there, all the band’s members would do is silently press buttons to play their songs, all the while staring blankly into the audience. To make their voices fit with their music’s mechanical sound, the band used a custom-built vocoder to seamlessly add their voices to the menagerie of synthesised instrumentals used in their songs. However, Kraftwerk’s music was still not entirely divorced from the human hands that made it, and the same went for the later band Daft Punk, who used various synthesisers as well as their iconic helmets to disguise their identity.

The first truly virtual singers were called LEON and LOLA, a pair of soul singers, who in all respects were normal musicians - apart from the fact that they weren't real. LEON and LOLA were two examples of Zero-G Limited’s (a company that developed libraries of sound effects) new enterprise: the VOCALOID project. LEON and LOLA’s voice providers were real people, who formed a library of sound fragments which could be put together to form words. They were, essentially, human synthesisers. However, LEON and LOLA weren't very popular. They were aimed at professionals, with neutral advertising and box-art to evoke an image of an instrument rather than a person or character. Even now, LEON has only featured in 44 songs. However, this was all soon about to change.

The VOCALOID Project was organised by a Japanese company called Crypton Future Media. As interest in their vocal synthesiser project grew, they decided to revamp the Vocaloids’ appearance in 2007, giving them slightly updated voices and, most importantly, creating characters to go on the boxes in which the software was being sold. The second the Vocaloid voices were given recognisable appearances, their popularity exploded. Instead of being seen simply as instruments with which to make music, Vocaloids became digital idols, with talented producers from around the world writing music for them. LEON and LOLA, although remembered fondly, were left in the dust as the Japanese Vocaloids produced by Crypton Future Media with their smooth, clear vocals and striking character designs came to prominence. Arguably the most famous of these was Hatsune Miku, a blue-haired 16-year old voiced by Saki Fujita. Along with her came MEIKO, KAITO, Rin & Len (an iconic duo, although people still don't know if they're friends or twins). 

Vocaloids became a musical sensation. As Hatsune Miku was pushed in American markets as well, songs made using her software reached new heights of popularity - as of today, the most popular song using Hatsune Miku (World is Mine, by Ryo(supercell), used in the Project DIVA videogame) has 59 million views on Youtube and millions more on Japanese video sites. To put this in perspective, the number of people who have listened to this song is more than 90% of the UK’s population, not even counting views on different platforms. This is unheard-of popularity for software like this, and totally unexpected even by the company that made it.

Vocaloid is a subject that I could write several thousand words about (the amount of content produced relating to Vocaloid is frankly immense, and I have hardly mentioned Project DIVA or Project SEKAI, the two Vocaloid rhythm games), but I’ll leave you with this brief overview and move onto slightly more recent examples of virtual singers. 

Gorillaz are by no means a new band, but they continue to remain immensely popular and startlingly relevant. They are a band of many mediums - 2D and 3D animation, cartoons, comic strips and music videos all provide an insight into the band’s unique universe. Live performances have fallen into a similarly diverse range of categories, ranging from Vocaloid-esque projections of themselves to the band playing live on stage. The band have sold over 27 million records worldwide, and are described by Guinness World Records as the world's "Most Successful Virtual Band".

The most recent character falling into the 'virtual singer’ bracket is named Polar. She's from the ‘Metaverse’, a virtual world created by Mark Zuckerberg intended to be “the internet, but in 3D”. Many have criticised her as a copy of the pioneering virtual singers upon whose shoulders she stands, and I can see why - at first glance, she is practically identical to Hatsune Miku’s copyrighted design, sporting her iconic blue twintails. As well as this, her debut single ‘Close To You’ shares a name with another popular Hatsune Miku song. Ironically, when I searched up ‘polar metaverse singer’ to try and find more information about her, the first result was Hatsune Miku’s Wikipedia page. 

Polar is made by a company notorious for strange, overtly capitalist attempts to connect with the Gen Z market, called TheSoul Publishing. You might know them from their YouTube channel, ‘Five-Minute Crafts’, variously described as ‘bizarre’ and 'nonsensical’. This simply seems to be another of their money-making gimmicks rather than a serious endeavour, and Polar’s own YouTube channel demonstrates her unpopularity. Despite having around a million subscribers, the vast majority of her videos hover around only two hundred likes. 

Despite Polar’s abject failure, other virtual singers continue to advance and innovate. VOCALOID6, the newest update to the Vocaloid software, released only 39 days ago, and Gorillaz’ new album was announced this summer. Looking into the future, it doesn't seem as if the popularity of virtual singers is declining. Despite the fact that this concept has been around for about sixty years, new musicians are continually taking the concept of music without musicians and remaking it. It seems as though the future of the virtual singer is fluorescently bright, and as we move into a new era of technology, I’m sure that they will continue to change and develop.