Living in St Kilda means that all sorts of cool things happen in my neighbourhood. Like last month's St Kilda Festival down at the beachfront.
I shuffled to the back of the crowd for the final act of the rock concert, pretending I was still 20-something. But before long my age showed through.
You see this act called Muscles came on stage - a man with a box the size of a portable organ. He pressed some buttons and the huge stage speakers boomed out a drum beat.
He pressed some more and a rhythmic tune played, and then he sang over the top. Nice intro, I thought, now the rest of the band will come on. But they didn't.
I moved to look into the stage flies for the silhouettes of guitarists and trumpeters. No-one there. This man was truly solo. But the kids in the crowd waved their arms and rocked to the beat and didn't seem to notice that it was one man with a barrel organ. And that was the main event.
I left wondering about all those drummers and guitarists and piano players who didn't get a gig that night because they were replaced by a robot.
Then I saw the real robots.
In Japan (as always?) they lead the way, with Hatsune Miku. She is one of the top-ranked pop stars in the country. A sexy sixteen-year-old with short skirt, long legs and two long turquoise pony tails that sway with the rhythm as she belts it out on the concert stage.
Except she isn’t real, she’s a 3-D hologram, a computer generated character from manga cartoons. Her voice and music are animations too. She sings through the Vocaloid 2 software developed by Yamaha.
The program uses the voice of a Japanese actress broken down into their basic phonics and then brings them together with controls for pitch and tone. You input your own words, and they are sung. But not like HAL from 2001 Space Odyssey, this is a “real” voice with a wide vocal range.
Check her out on YouTube and you’ll find her “39 Festival” concert where her projected 3D hologram sings and dances to an adoring live crowd of 25,000 fans, backed by a band of (thank goodness) real musicians.
Even opera isn't immune from the tide. An English company called Zero-G was one of the early developers of Vocaloid software and now sell a small library of voices. "Tonio" is their tenor (handsome stubble-chinned avatar on the box), while "Prima" has soprano voices including duets.
But Emma Matthews needn't start worrying yet. While the voices are very good and well programmed, they lack a human quality. But they always hit the top notes they are set.
There is a growing world interest in the field, with professionals like Mike Oldfield using the voices to spice up their music mixes.
As thousands of musicians, animators and programmers work on expanding and polishing the programs, you can be sure that the quality of productions will skyrocket and that the Hatsune mania will spread around the world in various guises.
In Japan her first album sold 80,000 copies and her latest was at 31,000 by the end of January - and this at a time when CD sales are supposedly dying. This one's very much alive.
When Hatsune's creators were deciding how to extend their character, some 40,000 fans signed a Facebook petition for an English language version of the pop star. It's now in the works, look out for her in your local music store.
