Girl-instrument: Posthumanism, producers, and virtual performers in Japanese music

Vocal synthesizer programs such as Vocaloid use artificial intelligence to create humanlike vocal tracks without human singers. These programs often tie their voice banks to animated avatars, making each user-created song a part of a never-ending oeuvre of work for a distinct virtual performer. These avatars can not only be used in images and video, but also in augmented reality concerts through semi-transparent LED screens that make it look like these animated virtual performers are performing live. ‘Vocaloid’ then is not only a software or a genre of music created using that software, but also denotes a hyperreal virtual performer. Through a feminist critique that utilizes Inter-Asian referencing, this paper problematizes the issue of removing the human from the female body to make it widely usable as a medium of expression and question the usage of Vocaloids in consideration of the future of digital technologies.