Jun 14 2016

This is Live. No. Really. Sort of. (DaddyTube)

This video, of Hatsune Miku, a Japanese Vocaloid star (?), blew my mind. You have to watch long enough to really get the effect I got. I don’t want to spoil it but I will tell you that this is a live concert. Watch a bit of it. Hell, watch the whole thing, it’s under 3 minutes.

Did you see what I saw? Actual real-live musicians playing along with a hologram? In front of an audience of actual humans?

Wow. Just… wow.

On the one hand, it’s End Times stuff. But the technology behind it is fascinating. There is a Vocaloid Keytar! (Warning: the video is very strange and includes a person in a dinosaur suit, dancing.) It goes deep.

I haven’t found anything that indicates there are any English versions. However, listening to a couple of songs (literally a couple, I only checked out two, both by Hatsune Miku, who is not a real person but performs with a live band) I’ve decided that it isn’t as bad as some current pop music. Plus you don’t have to worry about lyrics like “brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack” because it’s mostly in Japanese.

Not too bad, right? I mean, for pop music. It depends on how you feel about that sort of thing.

Mostly it was seeing the real musicians performing alongside a hologram that freaked me out.

h/t to the folks who showed this to me, one of whom was Lucas Gonze and the other of whom was Tom.