The Birthday Girl herself

If you are a tremendous fan on the Vocaloids in general, and Hatsune Miku (初音ミク) in particular, chances are you’ll have today marked off on your calendar in a visible but tasteful way. The reason being that today, August 31, is the 3rd anniversary of Miku’s introduction to the world – yes, on August 31, 2007, Crypton Future Media released the first of their “Character Vocal Series” – that being Miku.

So from me, and Animated Meanderings – お誕生日おめでとうございますミクちゃん！！ (Happy Birthday, Miku-chan!!).

If you’re looking for a little more history – read on.

Picture credit: Crypton Future Media

The Hatsune Miku character uses the Vocaloid voice synthesizing technology that was developed by Yamaha Corporation and her voice was sampled from Japanese seiyuu Fujita Saki – something she is pretty well known for in Japan.

Nico Nico Douga, a Japanese video sharing site (similar to Youtube, and in fact started there) played a major role in promoting awareness of the software (and by extension the character) when users started posting videos with music created by using the software – the site eventually became a place for collaborative content creation – as the popularity grew songs have been composed by major artists and groups in the Japanese entertainment industry – including Supercell and 19′s Sound Factory.

Hatsune Miku is arguably the most popular Vocaloid in the entire series – so-much-so that several criticisms have been posted that she is being used for songs that her voice isn’t suited for – in response, Cryptic released the Hatsune Miku Append, which featured a package of six different tones of Miku’s voice: Soft (gentle, delicate voice), Sweet (young, chibi voice), Dark (mature, heartbroken-like voice), Vivid (bright, cheerful voice), Solid (loud, clear voice), and Light (innocent, heavenly voice). – source: Wikipedia

As an added bonus – for myself at least – the DVDs for the Hatsune Miku Thanksgiving concert held on the 9th of March came into stock today (timed like that, no doubt) – so I’m hoping to have my grubby paws on my copy in the very near future.

Plenty of other blogs decided to cover the birthday as well, and I’ll list a couple of them here for interest:

Kyourankyodai – lots of pretty pictures.
Alafista
CosplayPro – with plenty of Hatsune Cosplays.

So, if you’re a fan, join us all in celebrating the birthday of one of our favourite characters, and lets hope for many more years and lots of new music to come.