to-do list: make links translate up, finish google doc, transfer full text over from google doc, apostrophes quotation marks and ellipses, make a dark mode. separate sidebar and main?

!! If you have difficulty accessing NicoNicoDouga, use this along with the doc. Honestly even if you arent having trouble i recommend that you use it anyway

Before you start this thing, you deserve to know why i care so much and why im obsessed with trying to get the word out about the "real" vocaloid community and all that.

An iceberg is actually a pretty great allegory for vocaloid/vsynth as a scene and subculture. The surface of the iceberg, what can be seen above the water, what most people see, is trendy anime characters that come from these nifty voicebanks and so they're prime meme making material. From what i've seen... a lot of people only care about Miku and Teto (and sometimes Neru) as these "iconic" and memeable characters but they don't understand WHY they ever got popular in the first place. for one example, I saw WAY too many people call the project sekai movie the "miku movie" when that came out, and getting confused when they understand none of what was happening in the film, because they just know miku and only care about miku, but they don't!! Know what Miku really is!! Ahh!!!

Anyway, the second layer of the iceberg, under the water, is when you start acquainting yourself with the music and you're like "oh, cool music! This is a cool music scene."

But then there's the deep depths. Not many people are down here. It's when you realize... that Miku, and any vocal synth character, is really made of love. Behind the cute anime characters and wonderful songs are real thousands of people who compose music, illustrate artworks, animate music videos, craft cosplays, translate lyrics, use whatever their skills are to be creative basically. All of it is independent music, and though lots of artists got signed with record labels in the 2010s, the scene sprang from hobbyists, and is still mostly that way today. But anyway, A vocal synthesizer isn't just some cute character, these characters become catalysts (just like musical instruments do) for the users who input their lyrics and melodies and craft into them. A vocal synth becomes more than a lifeless voice and an illustration; it is now a very specific voice that came from the user. That voice and character is now carrying the thoughts and feelings of its users with it.

These characters like Miku typically have very little official characterization. This lets artists freely interpret her however they wish, creating bajillions of Miku variations that are simultaneously all her. Characters like Miku unites thousands of artists, from all over the globe who all make completely different kinds of music and other forms of art, at all different skill levels, all together. These characters like Miku aren't really fiction anymore... they're not created by just one person, but rather every one who creates a piece of art for them contributes to the character itself. So a character like Miku... she is made of everyone that has ever loved the art that she's made of! She is made of love and creativity... And in a sense... it kind of brings her out of the fictional world, because her being is a collective of real people.

Hope I explained that well.

TL;DR Miku is a new, never-seen-before kind of fiction.

Here's a cute excerpt from an interview with Shiba Tomonori, the author of Why Did Hatsune Miku Change the World? and Hachiouji-P, a renowned Vocaloid artist, translated by vgperson:

Tomonori: "Come to think of it, last year, I had a chance to give a high school lecture as an alumni at my alma mater, and I put 'Tell me your favorite artists' on a survey I gave at the end of class. And while most named people like Official Hige Dandism and Back Number from J-pop and rock, there were a few kids who very passionately listed Vocaloid producers. Maybe not everyone in the class would like them, but the fact those few were so passionate about it made me very glad about youth culture."

Hachiouji-P:"That couple percent of kids were true Vocaloid lovers."

Tomonori: "They really wrote a lot of them, like DUSTCELL and Tota Kasamura and Harumaki Gohan. I even had some new discoveries, where I went and searched them and listened to them, and was like 'Hey, this is good!' I felt deep in my heart how no matter what generation it is, teenagers have all the answers."

And here's a passage from Hatsune Miku - The False Idol and Her Fandom as a Body Without Organs (which you can read here, though I only really care about this passage): (italics for emphasis added by me)

"Miku's fan culture in particular raises questions of whether fandoms such as this can even be considered 'fans' in the traditional sense, as in reality, they are not focused around a media text, they have developed so far outside of this that they are more accurately considered fans of each other and themselves."

I want to explain the way this Doc will work because it might be a little confusing for you if I don't: The format of the MAIN part of this Doc (beginning at "2007: The First Sound of the Future") is basically a list of all of the notable/impactful vsynth songs. Every time a new character is featured in a song, at that chronological point in the list I interrupt the list to introduce them and provide necessary context right before the song's place on the list, and the list returns to listing and I just add songs with the character to the list from that point on. That is how this experience will go.

The songs I have linked to in this thing are chosen by me, solely based on which ones I consider to be especially notable/impactful

Some things I factored in (not important unless you're curious):

1. Because duh obviously, it's iconiiiic~~~
2. In the Vocaloid community, there are three "halls of fame" that notable Vocaloid songs can be placed in based on the amount of views the song's video has accumulated on NicoNicoDouga (I'll explain what that is later in Context). Songs with 100K+ views are in the "Vocaloid Hall of Fame", songs with 1M+ are in the "Vocaloid Hall of Legends", and songs with 10M+ are in the "Vocaloid Hall of Myths". Video views on NND used to be a way bigger deal than they are now. If a pre-2015 song is the Hall of Legends or Myths, that factors into notability.
3. The song is in Project Diva. I did NOT include all Project Diva songs though, because NOT ALL OF THEM are that important. Or, other games like Typenist, Maimai, Chunithm, or similar.
4. The song has an extraordinary amount of YouTube views/Spotify listens. Usually that's around 10M+.
5. i keep seeing it on a bunch of peoples' own lists of classic vocaloid songs
6. If it's over 12 or so years old and has 1M+ views on youtube
7. If it has its own article on the Vocaloid Wiki

I want you to know that (despite how factor #1 may make it seem) I did NOT just list every song I like. That would be thousands of songs. I put a lot of songs on here that I dislike, or don't care for. I removed many songs after rethinking if they should be on here. I will not be letting you know which ones I like and don't like because that's my subjective opinion and it's not relevant*, but I will be labeling songs that may have unpleasant contents, and I will specify what those contents are for you every time. You can choose to listen or not to listen to whatever songs you want. It is up to you.

*Okay teehee just for you

For all songs, I provide links to either the Vocaloid Wiki, the Vocaloid Database (better known as "VocaDB"), or the VocaloidLyrics Wiki. Please know my reasoning for doing this for you:

1. Vocaloid Wiki: Decent background info on a few songs
2. VocaDB: Can always count on it for accurate links to official uploads and information, and if you make an account for VocaDB you, yes you, can keep track of the songs you like via the Like, Favorite, or Lists features
3. VocaloidLyrics Wiki: Can always count on it for accurate, reviewed lyrics translations, and like VocaDB has excellent and accurate information about songs

If it's linked for a song, I want you to read it.

As for song titles, I almost always provide both the romanized Japanese and English versions because in most cases both are known and referred to by English speaking fans. In the case of the romanized Japanese being absent, the title is originally in English OR it's just that nobody calls it by its Japanese title, which mostly happens when the song is only popular on the English side.

If you're viewing a video on NicoNicoDouga, here's some things you need to know: first, overseas (non-Japanese) users cannot use the site anymore unless you have a VPN or something. Once you figure out a way to access the damn site, be sure to change your site language to Japanese. This way, you can actually see the comments on the videos, and sometimes they're very interesting and fun even if you don't know Japanese, you can still see people making pictures and whatnot. You can change your language by, only on a channel/profile's page for some reason, scrolling down to the bottom and then the language change drop-down menu will be there.

I leave you with one last bit of advice: If you like a song, keep an eye out for the name of the producer again on the list. A ton of producers are recurring! It might be fun to see them come up again and again, and to cheer them on throughout Vocalo-history through this doc.

Feel free to skip this nugget, it's just a chance for me to nerd out a bit!

The very first vocal synthesizer (if you don't count the vox humana) was called the Voder (Voice Operating DEmonstratoR), invented by Bell Labs engineer Homer Dudley in 1937. The user would "play" it by using the fifteen piano-like keys and the pedal. Here is a demonstration of the Voder.

The first computer to actually sing was the IBM 704*, actually a speech synthesizer. It was assisted by the Vocoder, another Homer Dudley invention that was built for voice encoding, emulating, and encryption. The IBM 704 synthesized the words of the song and then the Vocoder put it into music notes. Together, they sang "Daisy Bell" by Harry Dacre in 1961.

*Some sources, like Wikipedia, say it's the IBM 7094, not 704, but I'm pretty confident that it was the IBM 704, as the sources I've read that attest to the singer being 704 tend to be more specific in how the vocal synthesis process actually occurred, so I trust them more. But I'm not a professional, so of course take my word with a grain of salt when it comes to IBMs.

A photo of IBM 704... isn't she cute? o((^w^))o

Doujin culture. Read about it here or here if you are unfamiliar. (Note that the word "doujin" has an implication of pornographic content for most people, but while that is a deserved reputation, that is not always the case.)

But if you want to talk about generally, the Vocaloid phenomenon was able to be born in Japan thanks to the nation's unique collectivist culture, which doujin culture stemmed from, and then Vocaloid stemmed from that.

Vocaloid is a vocal synthesis software created by Yamaha, the very same company that made all those pianos and motorcycles. The characters that represent the voicebanks in anime girl form are licensed to third party companies; for example, Miku's is Crypton Future Media, Inc.

Miku was not the first Vocaloid–she was actually the seventh. Yamaha had previously created the voices "LEON", "LOLA", and "MIRIAM", before creating "MEIKO" and "KAITO", both of whom had mascot characters, Meiko and Kaito. These cool characters made the products sell astronomically better. However, Kaito was initially deemed a failure by the company for underselling their expected goal, and the reason is most likely because he is a male/masculine voice and the main market for singing voices is with female/feminine singers.

Meiko and Kaito also had one more difference than the first three; their target singing language was Japanese. Yamaha started making the switch from English to Japanese because Japanese has much fewer phonemes than English. And, in Japan, the land of mascots like Domo and Pikachu, they suspected that if they gave their products mascots, they would sell better...

(Hey! Here's a fun Vocaloid game...)

(Source 1, source 2, source 3)

When Vocaloid first kicked off on the Japanese video-sharing website NicoNicoVideo (also frequently called NicoNicoDōga even in English, or just NND, because people don't care for the official name in English) in 2007, there was a lot of overlap with the Idolmaster fandom at the time. Idolmaster is the most iconic*, maybe the original idk im not educated in this subject, idol-raising sim. In idol-raising sims, the player is called "(Player Name)-P" by the characters, for example "Steve-P". The "P" stands for "Producer", because in these games the player's role is the producer for these idols. So, Vocaloid fans started calling Vocaloid song creators "(Name)-P" as a fun nickname, likening them to being the "producer" of the Vocaloid character they were working with, which also strengthened the feeling of the camaraderie in the Vocaloid community.

*I cannot overstate this. I have even heard the trio of Idolmaster, Touhou Project, and Vocaloid be called "the big three" of NND a few times.

A producer (now the term everyone uses for a Vocaloid song creator (also "Vocalo-P" from the Japanese name for it but that's less common))'s P name was not chosen by them, but by fans. This tradition has since fallen out of practice, but it's still pretty common to attach a "-P" to the end of your username if you're debuting as a Vocaloid producer anyway.

Read a brief overview here. But this does not even list all of the important character items (for some reason they don't mention Rin and Len's oranges and bananas??? This wiki...), so I will mention each important character item when I introduce a character.

MMD, short for MikuMikuDance, is a free 3D animation software developed by a Vocaloid fan named Yu Higuchi in 2008 so he could make Miku dance, but the program enjoys popular usage worldwide, even to this day, for tons of things other than Vocaloid, and is easily recognizable by the style of its 3D humanoid models. Chances are you've watched a MMD video before or at least seen one on your YouTube recommended and, if you're not a nerd, thought it was weird and cringey.

What's important to know about MMD is that it's an extremely common practice to share and download assets and data to make the animations online. So an MMD animation might use lighting data made by one person, a model made by another, a stage (virtual background world) made by someone else, and the motion data made by the person who actually uploaded the video, though motion data is commonly distributed too. And, of course, the song that the model is dancing to is a song that the uploader is a fan of. And, don't forget, MMD is a free software in the first place so any amateur can download and learn how to use it. MMD videos are a perfect example of early Vocaloid creation culture like you saw in the diagram in action, and these videos helped boost the popularity of the scene.

An utaite is a singer who covers Vocaloid songs with their own voice and posts that cover as a video to NND under the "utattemita" (Transl: "I tried to sing... (X song)") tag. Now utaites are mostly on YouTube and sometimes they cover human-sung originals. The most popular utaites include: Mafumafu, known for his naturally high voice and his incredible range, Miyashita Yuu, known basically for being mysterious and androgynous, 96neko (pronounced "Kuroneko"), Sou, Ado (you may have heard of her, especially from "Usseewa"), Chogakusei, who im pretty sure is only popular for his sexiness appeal, among others.

There are also singers who speak languages other than Japanese who try to make covers that change the lyrics into their own language. The most popular English ones are Jubyphonic, splendliferachie aka Rachie, Will Stetson, and Trickle, among others.

Not called utaites, there are also many artists who cover vocaloid (or human-sung) songs but with vocal synths other than the song's original. In my opinion, the best of these is 2cada, but there are a bajillion of this type of cover artist. The most popular one is definitely kyaami, also known as cillia.

Please click on these even if you're confident you haven't heard of them, I'm basically 100% sure you will be surprised by at least the first one!

• Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya! by daniwell, cover by MomomomoP | Article on Vocaloid Wiki | Page on VocaDB
• Helvetica Standard
• You would only recognize this if you've ever seen Nichijou...
• my time by bo en | VocaDB | VocaloidLyrics Wiki
• Sad Machine by Porter Robinson | Vocaloid Wiki | VocaDB
• Goodbye To A World by Porter Robinson | VocaDB
• Love Taste by Moe Shop ft. Jamie Paige | VocaDB
• Koinu no Carnival by EHAMIC | VocaDB | VocaloidLyrics Wiki
• Trended in 2023 after its inclusion in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
• hello world by Louie Zong | VocaDB
• Any song from Scratchin' Melodii, like Stir & Mix | VocaDB