The stage is bathed in black, purples and reds, and rainbow lasers flash through the air. A 2011 performance from the city of Sapporo, for instance, opens with green glowsticks moving like a shoal of fish through the dark, thrusting into the air as one when Miku appears, miming playing a guitar. To get a better idea, just look on YouTube. Miku's popularity - 10,000 tickets for four Tokyo shows sold out within hours for about $80 each last year - is evident at her concerts, where's she's projected in 3D on to the stage and backed by human musicians. "The crowd went absolutely crazy for it." "So many genres are being created," he says. Ho even played a DJ set of uptempo electronic dance music by Miku and other Vocaloid artists at a club night during the recent Sydney Manga and Anime Show. While some producers manipulate her voice to make it sound more human, others add a more mechanical filter. I guess she's just the typical teenage girl that anybody would like to be like." She's both an individual, and undefined enough that people can project all sorts of characteristics." Meanwhile, Emong Zheng, 20, a Miku fan and student from western Sydney, says: "She's definitely always happy. Rebecca Suter, senior lecturer in Japanese studies at the University of Sydney, notes, "Having a name and just a few traits creates a very peculiar object. "Anybody can be a producer of Hatsune Miku," explains CFM's marketing director Kanae Muraki. You type the words into the program along with their mood, pitch and length. Her anime-inspired avatar was invented to sell Yamaha's Vocaloid 2 voice synthesiser program, launched by Crypton Future Media (CFM) in 2007, which lets anyone construct a song from individual phonic units stored in a database. Miku might seem like nothing more than a high-pitched singing cartoon, but she's the spearhead and symbol of a radical cultural phenomenon. She pirouettes like a ballet dancer, looks up to the sky, and drifts off the ground, slowly dissolving into nothing - a creative twist to a performer leaving the stage.
Hatsune Miku's projected image trills a few lines from Isao Tomita's Symphony Ihatov, dancing delicately on top of the musicians, with a small kick here, a half-turn there, tilting her head from side to side. The world's most versatile performer is floating like a six-metre-tall ghost above the ranks of the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra and two banks of chamber singers.