Vocaloid

As put on the official website, "Vocaloid is a technology for singing voice synthesis developed by Yamaha, and the name of this software application. The software allows users to input melody and lyrics in order to synthesize singing. In other words, with this technology, singing can be produced without a singer.".

Luka, Gumi and Miku, three of the most popular Vocaloids.

This software started out small, but had a huge boom in popularity when Hatsune Miku was introduced, a female singer with two very long blue pigtails. Her voice is sampled from Japanese voice actress Saki Fujita, and her name can be read as meaning "first sound future" (hatsu 初, ne 音, miku ミク (a nanori reading of mirai 未来)).

By now there are many, many songs online created by using one of the various digital singers, with some very prominent songwriters, producers and illustrators in the community. The video below, with music and lyrics by Nem, vocals by Vocaloid singers Gumi and Kagamine Len, and art by Tama, is really fun. It has English subtitles, so check it out! The song style is not for everyone (it really does sound synthetic), but the animation is so sweet. It's called "Ah, It's a Wonderful Cat Life":

Now, there are a bunch of artists who cover these songs, and they go by the name of Utaite. However, I'm not very familiar with those artists yet, having only heard a few covers, and the only one I really know is 96neko (96猫), pronounced kuroneko. She has a rather deep voice, which is pleasant (and a bit odd) after listening to high-pitched synthetic singing. It's easy to find compilations on youtube - here's a 1 hour compilation of some of her covers (with videos):

There's also some very good fanart out there, so I've been having a lot of fun exploring in the past few days! I have some more "serious" tabs open, too, so you may next hear about Gilgamesh, sakko (a Japanese geisha hairstyle or German men's jacket, depending on the language you speak), or even flight tickets. Finally booked my flight to the States today, after much poking around. I suppose music's a more interesting topic to post about, but maybe I'll point out the top websites I use. For now, I leave you with vocaloids!