Opera beyond Human: Vocaloids, Mixed Realities and Singing Machines

In shedding light on such issues, this chapter focuses on how we might pose the question of what it means to be a human in the context of contemporary opera, and how we can attend to the processes of “becoming” a cyborg, a machine, an animal, and/or a monster through the shifting medium of the singing voice. What is the line that separates a human from a “beyond human” mode of singing? How can we contend with this ever-shifting, ever-fluid border that exists between human and “beyond human”?
The reinvented relationship between the singing body and the voice lies at the core of the most intriguing attempts to question opera as a stable genre. To this end, I will refer to four case studies of (operatic) singing beyond the human: Kate Miller-Heidke, Livia Kolk, and Nederland Kamerkoor’s singing in Eight by van der Aa; Singing Machine by Riches (singing Johnson’s The Audition); The Lamentations of Orpheus (a “solo choreography for an orange industrial robot to Monteverdi’s aria from L’Orfeo (1607)) ; and the hologram vocaloid Hatsune Miku’s singing in Keiichiro Shibuya’s opera The End (2013).