Piapro Characters: The virtual popstars created to promote software taking the world by storm
Hatsune Miku is a pop star taking the world by storm. Miku has held sell-out concerts from Japan to the United States, with shows in LA and New York scheduled for October. But Miku isn’t real. Not in the sense that Milli Vanilli weren’t real – she belongs to a family of humanoid personas called Piapro Characters. Yes, a whole family of anime-like cuties that sing, and even perform ‘live’.
The Piapro Characters were created for voice synthesiser software ‘Vocaloids‘, by Crypton Future Media Inc. based in Sapporo, Japan.
The names themselves carry deeper meaning. Piapro is a portmanteau of sorts, combining ‘peer’ and ‘production’ to “expresses the meaning that users who have a broad knowledge and various talents share these qualities with each other and create something new together”. Meanwhile, Hatsune Miku means “The first sound from the future”.
Much like the Power Rangers, the Piapro Characters each have their own significant colours – Hatsune Miku (blue-green), Kagamine Rin (orange), Kagamine Len (yellow), Megurine Luka (pink), Meiko (red) and Kaito (blue).
Using the Vocaloid software, each Piarpo Character’s voice was specially programmed and recorded, so they all have their very own trademark voice and style of singing. Fans can even compose melody and input lyrics via Vocaloid for their favourite virtual singer to perform.
To make them even more life-like, the virtual singers have unique expressions and emotions according to the user’s work. Hiroyuki Itoh, The CEO of Crypton Future Media explains, “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.”
Since the Piapro Characters were first created in 2007 they released their very own albums, performed at 3D-projection concerts, appeared in TV commercials (they are spokespeople for Google and Toyota USA), have dolls and merchandises. Plus millions of songs have been created for them by fans, as well as their very own music videos and artworks created by their huge fan base.
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