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Kasane Teto's original UTAU design, with her 0401 arm tatoo.
| General Information | |
|---|---|
| Sex | Chimera |
| Age | 31 |
| Voice | Mayo Oyamano |
| Creator | TWINDRILL |
| Release | April 1, 2008 |
| Illustrator | Sen (線) |
| Website | https://kasaneteto.jp |
Kasane Teto's Synthesizer V design
Kasane Teto was built to be a joke.
Let me set the stage:
It's 2008. Hatsune Miku is at the peak of her initial wave of popularity.
As everyone knows from seeing the news, Miku is the first in a series by Japanese company Crypton Future Media called the "Character Vocal" series. By this point three had been confirmed, Miku, Kagamine Rin, and Kagamine Len, designated by their numbered arm tatoos.
If you happen to be a 2chan image board user wanting to pull a fast one on the Miku fans on the internet by making a fake new vocaloid character to get their hopes up, you know you need two, maybe three things:
So, as is typical among forum threads in the late 2000s, the people with the skills showed up to commit to the bit and execute the joke.
Illustrator Sen (線) went through a few iterations before settling on this final design with an "04" arm tatoo. User Yamanon provided a voice, initially presented as "Nobuyo Oyama" (小山 乃舞世), a parody of Nobuyo Ōyama (大山 のぶ代)2, a former voice actress for Doraemon (popular japanese kids cartoon), and later properly credited as Mayo Oyamano, and she sung a cover to "Miku Miku ni Shite Ageru", a popular early Miku song, as a "demo" song.
Then they proceeded to Get Silly With It when getting into the character details. "Kasane" means "overlapped sound" or "heavy sound", and "Teto" is shortened from "Tetopettenson", a parody song of "Le Beau Tambour". She's defined as a "BOUKALOID", using the character 某 which has a similar sound to "vo" and has a meaning of "so-and-so", so "kinda a vocaloid", or translated as "vo-kinda". She was released by "Crvipton", and her catchphrase is "Kimi wa jitsu ni baka dana (君は実にばかだな)" - roughly translated to "You really are an idiot, aren't you?" Fitting for the people she was meant to troll.
Miku has a blue and grey color scheme, so let's make her red and black. Miku is a fan of Leeks, a healthy vegetable, so let's make Teto a fan of french bread. Miku is characterized as loving, positive, and reserved, so Teto will be a tsundere, naughty, and an attention-seeker. Miku is 16 forever, let's say Teto is 31, an age that's completely unreasonable for an idol.
This is the kind of April Fools joke format I enjoy, fwiw. The kind where it seems innocent enough until more and more absurd things are added to it to make you realize it's a joke.
Let's say, she's a chimera! And her gender is a chimera, too!
After all that, a fake box art was made using the sketch by Sen, and there you go, trolling done. And it could have just been done there.
Except, well, there is that new "UTAU" program someone's making, a free software to actually compete with Vocaloid, and it would be a shame to let all this work go to waste, so why not make a recording for that, too? She would be one of the first singers available for the program (the others being Utane Uta, the default voice [lovingly nicknamed "Defoko"] and Momone Momo, whose voice you've likely heard before,3 Sometimes together referred to as "The 3 UTAU girls")
And thus, history was made. Later that year, people would use the UTAU voicebank, using her for backup like in Triple Baka, creating original songs like Song of the Eared Robot and Ochame Kinou. Bangers and all-timers, honestly. The former is probably the song most people know about her through if they know her at all. The latter is also part of a dancing trend, "Fukkiretta", which got it popular in Japan. Song of the Eared Robot is a weird, techy song which makes multiple references to scientific terminology in its lyrics but also references heartbreak and falling in love. With this spread, it's safe to say that Kasane Teto was in the hands of weirdos /positive. When a character is with the weirdos you know it's going to go far.
Over the years, Kasane Teto got songs here and there that popped up as being popular, such as "A Sardine Grows From The Soil" by Anonymous in 2012, "TypeWriter" by hario in 2014, "Girlving to the Right" by harufuri in 2015, and "Letter to the Blacked-out World" by Frog96 in 2022.
She also got a lot of covers. Especially of Miku songs, to the extent that people would refer to her as a sort of "discount Miku", as her voice is free to use. There's some history of her as a sort-of rival to Miku, in the sense of being jealous of her fame and seeking to become as popular as her, as explored in "Teto Territory" by oxi, parody of a Touhou remix/animation.
As one of the first UTAU singers in 2008 as well as having her voicebank be hard to work with (with UTAU being an utterly ancient program to use at this point), a lot of producers used her to evoke a feeling of a more nostalgic, simpler time, or as a singer that is literally trapped in the past. For better and worse, people wanted to keep returning to 2008. Her UTAU model also got updated a few times [a long section on the technical details of vocal models and when these updates has been excluded for the sake of simplicity].
These updates eventually led to Teto's Synthesizer V voicebank coming out in 2023, which hit the community like ten nuclear bombs.
While the voice bank doesn't sound the same as the UTAU original, people still liked it well enough to start using.
The fact that it was Synthesizer V instead of Vocaloid was a bit bittersweet. She's still not a vocaloid, but at the same time most producers these days prefer to work with SynthV. After so much time, this 31-year-idol has hit the big time with a commercial voicebank. Of course, the first major song to come out with her new voicebank was A remake of Song of the Eared Robot, of course. This one by suzie being the most polished and popular. Teto's SV voicebank sounds more mature than her UTAU version (crazy what 15 years will do to a person's voice), so the narrative of a 31-year old pop star hits different now. In 2023 with a much bigger and more vocal trans community online, people saw "Chimera" differently as well. With many people now existing as a sort of "chimera", being a sort of hybrid of multiple parts, looking at things from one way. A lot of trans women found that aspect relatable. Overall, it gives the feeling that Teto was granted a proper second chance. That for her initial debut her age didn't make sense, her gender didn't make sense, and so many things about her were just for a joke, and she mainly was used to sing someone else's songs. Now with her redebut, her age and voice feel more like that time has actually passed, her gender is recontextualized in terms of past confusion and current understanding like many trans people, and she's singing original songs made by all her fans, who never left.
A bunch of songs after her SynthV release went lowercase-v-viral, some of my favorites being the remake I linked above, Chilly by Yomitan Akane, Liar Dancer by masarada, Ai Ai Ai by sabio, Emotions Liar by miwashiba, Dizzy Paranoia Girl by KAT, and Kasane Teto's Feltagoon by Maxi Ukyo.
Override by Yoshida Yasei also came out about this time, which went more viral.
This snowballing effect continued until April of 2024, where first off, DAEMON/DOLL came out to celebrate Teto's birthday on the 1st, and this is like, an album full of all-timers. All 12 tracks are prtty good, though not all of them are to my liking. It was a dedicated project for making English SV songs for Teto. Machine Love released on this album to cap it off as a moving tribute to Song Of The Eared robot as well as Teto's history and future.
Then, on the 27th, Mesmerizer by 32ki came out, and this went capital-V-Viral. Like, "over ten million views on all platforms" viral. It's over 200 Million on youtube right now. I'm not a huge fan of the song myself, but after it came out Teto's SV use went from "getting more popular" to "suddenly skyrocketed into the stratosphere". This useage led to all new producers coming to the scene using SV Teto as well as a renewed interest in her original UTAU voicebank.
It truly is the classic underdog story. A singer made to be a quick joke and thrown away instead gets shown care by her creators and her fans who stay with her throughout the years, and all their effort is eventually rewarded with the singer coming back into the spotlight in a big way, and becoming just as popular, if not more, as her old rivals. As a plus, there's also a veneer of trans representation, as well as older age representation in the idol scene (though this matters less these days, as most vocal synth characters don't have an official age anymore). This singer made by trolls, who the weirdos resonate with, makes it to the big time, and even after all that, the fans are still making songs celebrating this fact and celebrating all the work it took to get her this far.
I hope it's a bit easier to understand why songs like Machine Love make me tear up with this.
And the cool thing is that people haven't really stopped yet. There's even been songs that explore how Kasane Teto would feel about her new fame, like To My Biggest Fan by beat_shobon with a poppy narrative about how she wouldn't feel like she earned her newfound fame and she needs to prove herself to everyone to make her fans feel proud, End of Fake! by Mimizu, an electronic track as a duet between UTAU and SV Teto, with a refrain similar to Machine Love, that the love she's gotten has made her real, and Spoken For by FLAVOR FOLEY, a pop track that gives a more literal interpretation of the Idol angle and portrays Teto as a solo act who has to deal with the negative parts of the idol industry and misses her old partners (the 3 UTAU girls), and is slowly going crazy due to the isolation.
On that positive note, I'll say that the explorations and interpretations people have made into this character aren't a unique thing done with Teto, she's just an older character who I've done more research into, though her history is particularly interesting. It's a a unique character and probably the only virtual singer that can be characterized through a character arc that took place in the real world.
