Getting Vocal(oid)
Nov. 11th, 2023 04:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAfter getting a flu shot yesterday at the drug store across the road from me, I spent the recommended following fifteen minutes inside the store. While wandering around I checked the calendar rack, and there I was a bit surprised to spot a Hatsune Miku calendar. Had I seen it among many other calendars in one of the stores set up in shopping malls near the end of a year that might have been one thing; I do recall having seen “anime-adjacent” calendars in those stores before. Among a more limited number of calendars, it stood out.
I suppose I’d still been thinking a bit about anime character costumes featuring on the first page of a Halloween party shop flyer last month, and this picked up that feeling. As ever, having lived through a previous retrenchment of “interest in anime over here” (or impressions of that as the focus shifted from DVDs to streaming, anyway) can leave me with the thought “surely this sort of exposure can’t last.” In this one case, though, I did get to thinking that the costumes had been from “big action series” for all that I’m kind of picky about which of those I do watch, but the computer-generated “Vocaloid” singing voices feel just a little bit more obscure to me. That might, of course, only mean “I haven’t got around to that myself.” I can at least suppose Hatsune Miku’s character design is memorable, and I did take peculiar interest when she had a speaking role not just as a singer in the Shinkalion super robot anime. It also happened that the Love Live mobile game featured a special track where Miku sang alongside the more conventional idol group Aqours.
I suppose I’d still been thinking a bit about anime character costumes featuring on the first page of a Halloween party shop flyer last month, and this picked up that feeling. As ever, having lived through a previous retrenchment of “interest in anime over here” (or impressions of that as the focus shifted from DVDs to streaming, anyway) can leave me with the thought “surely this sort of exposure can’t last.” In this one case, though, I did get to thinking that the costumes had been from “big action series” for all that I’m kind of picky about which of those I do watch, but the computer-generated “Vocaloid” singing voices feel just a little bit more obscure to me. That might, of course, only mean “I haven’t got around to that myself.” I can at least suppose Hatsune Miku’s character design is memorable, and I did take peculiar interest when she had a speaking role not just as a singer in the Shinkalion super robot anime. It also happened that the Love Live mobile game featured a special track where Miku sang alongside the more conventional idol group Aqours.