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Call it plastic pop if you will, but credit to the big brains at the University of Tokyo for making the effort to craft the modern synthetic chart-topper into something altogether more natural.
If the news still doesn't sound like a big deal, then perhaps a history lesson on Japan's hunger for virtual idols -- supercute pop singers created entirely on computers -- will get the juices flowing.
Japan's first real-world attempt to create a virtual idol was a digital darling by the name of Kyoko Date, also known as DK-96, who made her debut way back in 1996.
Came too soon: Unfortunately for her creators and any ambitions they may have held for Kyoko, the technology of the day wasn't sufficiently advanced to bridge the dreaded uncanny valley and her voice was provided entirely by a human being behind the scenes.
And so, DK-96 de-rezzed from the market almost as quickly as she had materialized. But, she clearly provided inspiration for what came next.
The 2007 appearance of a software application called Hatsune Miku breathed new (artificial) life into the virtual idol phenomenon. It allowed users to artfully arrange sound fragments pre-recorded by a voice actress into original songs, which the program then synthesized into music videos.
The application has proved so popular, Hatsune Miku has even appeared on stage in concert, as you can see in the creepy 'live' video below.
Future music: High-tech though Hatsune Miku may be, the strains of her synthetic crooning can still sound strange to human ears -- and whipping songs into shape still requires a lot of fine-tuning on the part of the user.
The new technology developed by University of Tokyo researchers Akio Watanabe and Hitoshi Iba, removes this last step from the equation.
It allows computer-generated singing applications to 'evolve' the most accurate tuning automatically, turning out respectable bubblegum pop that sounds tantalizingly close to that of real-life J-Pop acts. The key, say the creators, is in using real human performances as a baseline, or seed, used to spark that evolution.
Perhaps in the not-so-distant future, those pesky bags of blood and gore will drop out of the picture altogether. It isn't hard to imagine a program that spews out a pre-rolled song based only on a request to "sing me something happy."