(Essay) Sonic Technology and Community: Hip Hop and Vocaloid Culture

The advancement of technology frequently causes moral panic amongst society, alienating technology in a way where we imagine it is something beyond human. Music, however, has historically been a medium for people to bond over. In the 1970s-80s USA, hip pop culture thrived as artists were inspired by sound system culture, and creative uses of the turntables. In 2007 Japan, Crypton Future Media released a vocal synthesiser program developed by Yamaha, giving birth to the character of Hatsune Miku. Both the hip-pop community and the vocal synthesiser (often simply called “Vocaloid,” after the software name) community have been appreciated for their nature of bringing groups of people together, creating a space for people to express and explore themselves, the society, and technology. This essay is going to take a look at hip hop and vocal synthesisers, and how these types of sonic practices not only create community, but that their existence relies on it. I am going to focus geographically on America and Japan, with a focus on the hip pop groups/culture and the character of Hatsune Miku.

The history of technological sonic practices can be traced back to the 1940s, where French composer Pierre Schaeffer coined the term “Musique Concrète,” which eventually emerged into a new practice of musicians experimenting with magnetic tape to create new sounds. Musique Concrète refers to the idea of using pre-recorded music to create a new song. With the technology of magnetic tapes, people were able to cut, tape, and rearrange a track, which creates a new composition from a preexisting song. This would become one of the first instances of “sampling” in music. Sound system culture or sound clash culture is starting to thrive in Jamaica at the same time, in which DJs would bring their own equipment with the ultimate goal of winning against their neighbours in volume. DJs would have their own “selectors” who are responsible for picking the music that the DJ would play, and they have the pressure to pick the best vinyls to win over crowds. Sound system culture not only prioritised pre-recorded tracks over live performances, it was powerful in terms of the community that it brought within their neighbourhoods in Jamaica. It eventually spread to many other countries, including Japan.

Straying away from the history of sampling, in 1961, programmers created the first computer to be able to sing. The IBM 7094 performed the song “Daisy Bell”, initiating an ongoing history of people trying to create machines that would mimic the human singing voice. The first Vocaloids made by Crypton Future Media were English characters named Leon and Lola, developed as backup singing voices for Western music stars. In 2004, they released MEIKO and KAITO for the Japanese market. It was not until Hatsune Miku’s release in 2007 that Vocaloids really found a market. The Vocaloids function by pre-recording a voice actor’s voice singing various alphabets/sounds, creating a musical “font” which could later be tuned by producers, making the “characters sing”. Through the Musique Concrète and sound system culture, people started recontextualising the use of preexisting tracks, specifically with the technology of magnetic tape and the turntables. It is also heavily influential on music genres such as hip hop. And with the gradual development of vocal synthesisers, people are able to create music that are purely digital. With these technology, the culture surrounding these music strays further and further away from the notion of live performance.

The sound system culture’s influence on hip hop and the modern music scene is undeniable. In Simon Jones’ chapter “Rocking the House: Sound System Cultures and the Politics of Space,” he describes the community made by sound system cultures as “social networks…of existing peer-group, friendship, and neighbourhood affiliations, a feature particularly apparent in hip-hop culture,” making references to the Zulu Nation as such a group that attempts to translate gang culture into music, with a specific focus on being a political group. The Zulu Nation, now called the Universal Zulu Nation, is a hip hop group consisting of several street organisations from Bronx, New York. It was founded by Afrika Bambaataa during the era when gang culture was declining, often described as a group that wanted people who were on the streets to find a place. As an article named “Zulu Nation: From Gang to Glory” describes, “It used to be a really big deal for cats to hang out at the Bronx River and not get stuck. It was a sign of toughness and brought much prestige.”The sense of community the UZN has created brought upon a cultural impact even outside of the group; the act of calling women “Queens” and men “Kings” were started by the members in the UZN as a way to empower their members, believing that if you treat somebody like royalty, they’re going to act like royalty. Since the 1970s, the UZN is now one of the biggest political hip hop organisations to exist, and their influence can be seen worldwide. The term “King” and “Queen” used to describe men and women can now be heard through many hip hop rap verses, even in music produced by artists in Japan. In 2003, Japanese producer Nujabes released a track called “Think Different” with American rapper Substantial as the guest rapper. The lyrics write: “You call women bitches. I call them queens because they’re royal.” Many Japanese artists have had a personal connection with the UZN through Afrika Bambaataa, such as Sakamoto Ryuichi and Hosono Harumi from Yellow Magic Orchestra. Bambaataa held respect for these artists, saying that “Kraftwerk and YMO (Yellow Magic Orchestra) made hip-hop.” Outside of the creation of hip hop groups, there are many elements to hip hop music that establish connections between artists and audience—one of the biggest being sampling. Sampling refers to when an artist takes excerpts from other songs and interprets them into their own music. A Tribe Called Quest is an influential hip hop group in the 1980s that often samples from various older jazz songs, some examples being “Mystic Brew” by Ronnie Foster being sampled in “Electric Relaxation,” “Baby, This Love I Have” by Minnie Riperton appearing in “Check the Rhime,” plus many more examples. This culture of using pre-recorded music and hip hop artists sampling sounds has led to people accusing artists of copyright infringement and “stealing art,” a sentiment similar to the moral panic during when conceptual art is flourishing in the visual arts world. People eventually learned to see that the act of sampling is a form of sonic practice, which can result in music across time and culture being connected through one song.

Outside of hip hop, Japan’s music scene found its community with the rise of Vocaloid. For those unfamiliar with Vocaloids, Hatsune Miku might seem like a virtual character sculpted to be a fictional idol, or simply an “AI” musician made to replace “real” musicians. Unbeknownst to many, Hatsune Miku is a character that results from a series of human collaborations. From the engineers that developed her, to the character designer Kei, to producers and fans that create content for her and distribute them online—she is an idea built upon user-generated content. There is no doubt that when Crypton Future Media distributed Hatsune Miku, they were counting on her cute visuals and charismatic voice for commercial value. After all, Miku was a result of two previous Vocaloids who were put onto the market with disappointing results. However, it should not be overlooked that Hatsune Miku not only sold well on the market, she maintained and even gained popularity over the years. This is the effort of Japan’s doujin culture, where a community is made solely of fans, for fans, and maintained by fans. Doujinshi is one of the most popular forms of fan work in Japanese fan spaces, and one that usually causes friction between the fans, the creators and the law. One example of this is when a fan author created an ending for the manga Doraemon, a popular kids series which was never given an ending due the the two authors splitting, and one of them dying before given a chance to finish the manga. The doujinshi ending for Doraemon became so popular that many people mistook it as the canonical ending, causing the creator to have problems with this fan work as a violation of copyright laws. Though Japanese creators and copyright laws are usually lenient about fan content, the Doraemon situation was one they deemed too overboard. There are many other instances of where fan works divide the community that a media created due to the issues of “wrongful” interpretations, copyright laws and many elements beyond control. Hatsune Miku is a character that is largely immune to this sort of divide. In the same article that describes the Doraemon situation, “What Can We Learn from Japanese Anime Industries?” written by Tianxiang He, the author mentions Hatsune Miku’s relation with a character named “Black Rock Shooter.” The creator for Black Rock Shooter collaborated with Vocaloid producer Ryo to create a song for the character, using the voice of Hatsune Miku. Though this is all done without the knowledge of Hatsune Miku’s creators, the existence of this song could not have been seen as an offence. When we’re comparing these two situations involving fan works, what makes the Doraemon doujinshi controversial, and what makes Black Rock Shooter okay? Doraemon is a chronological series written by creators, where the characters, the world, and the plot are all in the control of these god-like creators. Hatsune Miku, however, is a character that provides us with nothing if she was left by herself. Without her voice actor, character designer, and every “fan” that becomes a Vocaloid producer, she would not have become what she is now. Though this is not to rule out the potential for people to misinterpret her identity. Through this analysis, we see how the technology of Hatsune Miku is built upon community, similarly to hip hop culture.

Though very different in terms of sound, region, and the types of audience it attracts, hip hop and Vocaloid music are similar and even interact in various ways. Both the culture that surrounds hip hop and Vocaloid relies heavily on collaboration. With hip hop, it’s through the creation of big hip hop groups such as the Universal Zulu Nation that connects numerous musicians, even from countries outside of America. Through the rising popularity of sampling, the controversies that it created through copyright and the act of media piracy has highlighted how hip hop music is created through community and connection. Through an examination of the development of Vocaloid, we see how the Vocaloid characters bloom into existence solely through the collaboration of people with multiple skills. Due to the nature of these sonic practices, many people have examined them through the lens of copyright laws. These practices raise the question of what blurs the line between blatant theft and works that reference other artists’ work from a place of passion. This essay highlights how groups, sampling, and fan works are ultimately a part of a culture, where the acts that can be seen as theft are actually acts of building communities.

Bibliography:

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D, Davey. “Zulu Nation: From Gang to Glory.” Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner. Accessed on April 5th, 2024. https://www.daveyd.com/zulunationhistory.html. 

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Jones, Simon. Rocking the House: Sound System Cultures and the Politics of Space. Journal of Popular Music Studies. 1995, pp. 1-24.

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“The History of Sound Clash Culture.” Genius. August 18, 2017. Video, 4:13. https://youtu.be/aASQlbktGkc?si=fLb2hnX57W9f2K5N.