Conference Agenda

In the past two decades, the Japanese popular music scene observed the meteoric proliferation of Vocaloid, a vocal synthesis database and software accompanied by an anime image, used by originally amateur musicians. In this paper, I focus on the emblematic Vocaloid Hatsune Miku and examine how its community allows for distinct forms of fan-authorship and a multifaceted conception of the musical text. I then propose an analytical model that addresses these concerns by evaluating the entire cyberspace occupied by the Vocaloid song.

Through a survey of musicological literature on Vocaloid (Zaborowski 2016, Bell 2016, Lam 2016), I argue that the heterogeneity of Vocaloid ontologies provides Vocaloid fans unique authorial power through participating in nijisousaku. Furthermore, it is important for the analysis of Vocaloid music to consider these fan-authorship processes. Through my case study of the 2021 Hatsune Miku song “kamippoina” (“God-ish”) by Vocaloid producer PinocchioP, I propose three nested forms of fan-authorship: the producer-as-author, the cover-artist-as-author, and the commenter-as-author. Through evaluation of lyrical content, form, timbre, and the unique style of audiovisual danmaku (“barrage subtitling”) commenting on the Japanese video-sharing platform Nico Nico Douga, I illustrate the variety of methods through which members of the Vocaloid community perform authoring activities.

Recent writing about public music theory primarily examines content in which creators impart expert knowledge to their audiences by explaining, demystifying, or decoding otherwise-impenetrable concepts, works, or genres. This kind of content is easily legible as public music theory, because it takes a familiar form. Much less legible as public music theory, then, is a very different but equally popular type of content: reaction videos, in which a creator records their affective response to hearing a new song for the first time. While reaction videos by their very nature do not offer any new knowledge or deeper understanding, they nonetheless amass millions of views. What kind of musical work, exactly, are reaction video creators engaged in?

Building on previous work by journalist Megan Garber (2016), who argues that reaction media democratizes the power dynamic between creators and audiences, and by ethnomusicologist Byrd McDaniel (2020), who argues that popular music reaction videos offer an alternative to analytical methods which seek to isolate a work from its context, I assert that “first time hearing” videos challenge our collective understanding about who certain works of music are for, about who has the authority to comment on them, and about what counts as meaningful public music-theoretical discourse. Many of the most popular reaction videos are created by young listeners of color with little if any formal musical training, and the nature of the reaction genre ensures that creators react to music with which they are not familiar. Instead of identifying themselves as experts, reaction video creators position themselves as equals to their viewers, or in some cases, as less experienced.

Finally, I warn against viewing these videos as utopic expressions of authentic musical response. After all, creators are motivated to give viewers what they want to see, which may take the form of validating the tastes of their much-older viewers or else performing the role of the inexpert to allow their viewers to assert their own expertise. Many of these videos simultaneously demonstrate new ways of listening while they also reinforce existing scripts about the cultural superiority of so-called masterworks.

Pop-jazz wunderkind Jacob Collier has become a Rorschach test in online musical discourse. His audacious musicianship and prominence as a public music theorist have prompted fans to label him an inspiring musical genius whose “genre is YouTube” (Chinen 2024). But his unapologetic maximalism also elicits scorn: critics often pan his music as overwrought, unexpressive, and soulless.

This paper examines this tension in the context of Collier’s participatory covers: live, lengthy piano-ballad renditions of famous songs, designed with sophisticated opportunities for his “Audience Choir” to sing along. Synthesizing scholarship about liveness and fandom, the aesthetics of covers, the dynamics of online music theory communities, and instrumental affordances as site of cultural meaning, I contend that Collier’s Audience Choir is an instrument whose affordances he collaboratively develops in public view. I plot the evolving relationships between these affordances, Collier’s virtuosic cover transformations, and musical social media, demonstrating Collier’s consistent reliance on a small number of musical schemas across his live concerts. I posit that Audience Choir contributions to these concerts might be productively understood as a kind of multi-piece: an interconnected, open-ended work, one in which individual cover source songs often serve as accessible entry points rather than dramatically essential musical foils. And I interrogate the kinds of public music theory being enacted by these participatory performances, foregrounding how Collier’s musical designs and internet presence complicate notions of creativity, authorship, freedom, and musical agency. Ultimately, I suggest that the internet-fueled circulation of musical content among Collier and his devoted fans should raise fresh questions about the types of relational listening and musical ontology that live cover performances can evoke in the 2020s.