STS confronts the Vocaloid: Assemblage thinking with Hatsune Miku

In recent years, a number of interlocking theoretical tendencies in science and technology studies have mustered around the idea that societies and cultures are part of a complex web of enrollments, networks, and human-nonhuman conjunctions enacted across a fluid domain of materialities. Drawn to non-totalizing ways of thinking, these tendencies embrace opportunities to reveal the heterogeneous, contingent, and emergent nature of sociotechnical relations and the interwoven mesh-works of technologies and bodies. Wataru Sasaki is a voice snatcher: his main job is to scour the internet for arresting voices. When he finds a voice that interests him, he will often invite the owner of that voice into the recording studio for a few days to record tiny fragments of that person’s singing and speaking voice. The Vocaloid environment itself resembles other music-making software insofar as it represents musical data on a timeline, the data subject to multiple forms of manipulation courtesy of the editing tools.