Sorry for the mp3-blogging pause. Gonna upload a few of my favourite vocaloid tracks (in the wake of my piece featuring em). This one, 'Avarice' by Polygron Prompt, is from 2011, but it really got me, bringing out the strange, fragile quality of the medium. It's Hatsune Miku, and she's singing against a techy jungly beat that suggests a futuristic computer game circa 1998, all its constituent elements propelled forward and spread out into mystique diffusion as if in search of bots to frag. The kicker is the tangibly dissonant way Miku sits on top of it, especially at the ends of her phrases. Intended or not, it's the perfect setting for vocaloids' technocratic uncanniness.
Sunday, 3 August 2014
polygron prompt: avarice
Sorry for the mp3-blogging pause. Gonna upload a few of my favourite vocaloid tracks (in the wake of my piece featuring em). This one, 'Avarice' by Polygron Prompt, is from 2011, but it really got me, bringing out the strange, fragile quality of the medium. It's Hatsune Miku, and she's singing against a techy jungly beat that suggests a futuristic computer game circa 1998, all its constituent elements propelled forward and spread out into mystique diffusion as if in search of bots to frag. The kicker is the tangibly dissonant way Miku sits on top of it, especially at the ends of her phrases. Intended or not, it's the perfect setting for vocaloids' technocratic uncanniness.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
Adam, the article is great, as ever. Weird that it should pop up just as I am preparing a class to deliver to my UG students on just that topic this week. Loved Vocaloid, the track above is great, and am enjoying digging through the links you put in the article - particularly interested in the Euro-American uses you allude to? FWIW, this is the track I've kept returning to after several years:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuOU_ymF8OQ
Anyway, good stuff.
Toby
Yeah, vocaloids are really something... I wish there was more Euro-American use of it tbh (a lot of the time it's unclear where people are from online really), but I understand that the software can be quite expensive and difficult to crack.
ReplyDeleteHadn't seen that performance. God those phonemes, so discrete. Guess they were recorded slower than they were pushed.
Nice to hear from you!
a