Hatsune Miku: A Cyborg Voice for E-lit

This presentation provides an overview of Hatsune Miku, a virtual pop idol, and showcases a work by the speaker that uses her image and voice as platforms for the creation of electronic literature. Hatsune Miku is a multitude of things at once: a pop star, a software product that uses Yamaha’s Vocaloid text-to-song technology, a fictional character, and ultimately a global collaborative media platform. The electronic literature project presented, “Miku Forever,” uses Miku’s global fanbase as a kind of raw material. An endlessly recombinatory pop song, the lyrics sung by Miku for “Miku Forever” are algorithmically generated from a corpus of songs she has previously sung, and her digital body and dance moves are sourced from open-licensed, fan-created assets available on the web.