She tried to hum the first two lines of “Himawari” a cappella.
The sound left her mouth, was precisely captured by the expensive condenser microphone, surged along the complex wiring into the mixing console in the control room, was amplified, and then instantly poured back into her ears through the monitoring headphones.
When she first heard “her own” voice so vividly through top-tier equipment, she involuntarily broke out in goosebumps.
‘Uwaah… what an unpleasant voice. Is this really my voice?’
It was completely different from the voice she usually heard.
The voice in the headphones was a pure “dry vocal” stripped of all environmental embellishment.
Extremely clear, extremely “close to the ear.”
The beginning and end of each breath, the opening and closing of each vowel’s mouth shape, even the extremely faint sound of mucous membranes when her lips parted—all were magnified countless times under the analytical power of this high-end equipment.
She couldn’t help but think of a universal common sense in modern society—after you send a voice message to someone on social media, if you’re foolish enough to tap and play it back yourself, you usually feel that the unpleasant voice inside is definitely not you.
Later, she learned from a popular science post that the reason people find their own voice messages unpleasant is because when you normally speak or sing, the voice you hear is a mixture of “air conduction + bone conduction.”
Bone conduction inherently adds a blurry spatial filter with intracranial resonance, making the voice sound more “magnetic,” deeper, and more pleasant.
Voice messages or recordings lack the low-frequency boost of the bone conduction “filter,” so the voice generally becomes sharper than usual, making people feel “strange” or even “unpleasant.”
Haruka’s feeling now was ten times more unsettling than listening to a recording.
It was like having her face pressed against a mirror while examining her skin with a magnifying glass—every speck of dust in every pore was painfully visible.
This feeling of nakedness, of “no place to hide,” made her flustered.
Over the past month, she had finally gotten used to her naturally magnetic and sweet voice, but that was entirely based on a self-satisfied sense built upon the bone conduction filter.
“Level’s okay. Frequency band is fine.”
Kato’s calm voice came through the headphones from the control room.
“Mr. Murakami, ready to start anytime.”
“Haruka.”
Murakami’s voice cut in, with a soothing tone.
“Are you ready?”
Haruka took a deep breath and forcibly suppressed the messy thoughts that had been cluttering her mind.
‘Unpleasant’ or not, work had to continue.
“I’m ready.”
“Good. First, a full take. Sing the entire song from start to finish. Don’t worry about small flaws. Just go with the flow and let me hear your current overall state. The accompaniment starts in three seconds.”
Haruka closed her eyes and silently counted her breaths: three, two, one.
The intro sounded in her headphones right on time.
However, this accompaniment was completely different from the original version she had heard countless times.
The melody was still the same, but the heavy synthesizer background noise was gone, replaced by crisp acoustic guitar.
The sound of the strings being plucked was clean and warm, without any electronic effect embellishment.
Each note felt as if it were plucked directly from the air.
Then came an extremely gentle piano chord, like transparent raindrops striking a calm lake.
The guitar and piano intertwined, forming a backing that was much thinner than the original, but also ten times purer and warmer.
The intro ended.
“—Himawari no you ni, sora wo miagete—”
(Like a sunflower, looking up at the sky)
The moment the first note slid from her throat along the airflow, all the tension in Haruka’s head miraculously vanished.
It was like being so nervous the night before an exam that you couldn’t sleep, but the moment you sat down in the exam room, picked up your pen, and saw the first question, your brain entered an absolutely calm “flow state.”
This song was far too familiar to her.
So familiar that it didn’t need to go through her brain; the pronunciation of the words and the pitch flowed out as naturally as breathing.
Every run, every pause in this song had long been etched into the cerebral cortex of a person once called Matsumoto Hidetoshi.
And now, this “solo fan auditory memory,” accumulated over several years and repeated countless times, had perfectly interfaced for the first time with Hoshino Haruka’s uniquely gifted “top-tier vocal hardware.”
The soft humming of the A section ended quickly.
Upon entering the B section, the melody shifted from a gentle narrative to a progression with a hint of urgency.
Haruka was completely immersed in the emotion of the accompaniment.
“—Makenaide, sakihokore—”
(Don’t give up, bloom proudly)
This was the emotional climax of the whole song.
In the original arrangement, a heavy electronic wall of sound and drum beats would be layered in here to boost the momentum, letting the lead vocalist’s voice ride the waves.
But this time it was an unplugged version, with only a thin guitar and piano as accompaniment.
This meant that the “explosive feeling” and all the emotional tension of the chorus had to be sustained one hundred percent by the human voice alone.
When she reached this point, Haruka’s vocal cords did something even she herself wasn’t aware of.
She didn’t use abundant breath and a raised volume to express “passion” like in the original.
Instead, she chose to convey an emotional upgrade through a friction in the texture of her voice, while keeping the volume almost unchanged.
Her voice, from the previous “soft and sweet,” instantly peeled away a layer of “toughness” with a hint of tiny breathy notes.
It was like a slowly straightened silk thread, constantly tightening, trembling on the verge of breaking, yet somehow holding on.
In the control room, separated by a window, engineer Kato’s fingers paused on the keyboard.
At first, he thought Haruka’s breath was unstable due to her recent recovery from illness, leading to a vocal mistake.
But as he listened intently, he noticed the subtle change hidden beneath the frequency spectrum that was unexpected.
As a recording engineer who had worked with her many times, Kato knew Hoshino Haruka’s singing style very well.
Her style had always been a typical “straightforward style”—young, energetic, directly applying force, directly exploding emotions.
Just like the name of this song, “Himawari”; straight and unwavering, growing wildly toward the sun.
The advantage of this style was that it sounded nice and had strong appeal.
But the disadvantage was also obvious: it was too thin.
Kato had suggested more than once that she enrich her vowel handling, but each time Haruka would confidently reply, “Only by being this straightforward will the fans be happy!”
In fact, the fans did approve, so Kato never brought up the suggestion again.
Now, Kato was hearing something extremely unusual from this voice that originally only knew “vitality”—something belonging to an adult, a heavy weight of life.
When the line “Makenaide (don’t give up)” burst out of the speakers with that quality of being on the verge of breaking yet gritting its teeth and holding on, Kato confirmed the fact completely.
He turned his head and looked at the producer beside him with interest.
Murakami had also somehow straightened his previously lazy posture.
He leaned forward, back tense, hands clasped under his chin, as still as if frozen.
Like Kato, he had suddenly become serious the moment Haruka started singing the B section.
“Level is stable, no peaking.”
Kato reported in a low voice.
Murakami didn’t respond, but closed his eyes again to feel the unique emotion just conveyed through the singing.
The chorus ended, leading into the bridge, followed by the last transposed chorus variation, reaching the highest emotional peak of the entire song.
Until the final long note, the sound faded with the breath until it dissipated.
The guitar accompaniment played its last chord, and the tail sound rapidly decayed to zero against the sound-absorbing walls of the recording studio.
The accompaniment stopped.
Haruka opened her eyes.
A dead silence of ten seconds fell over the control room.
Until Murakami slowly leaned forward and pressed the talkback button.
“…Haruka.”
“Hmm? What’s wrong? Did I sing something wrong?”
Haruka asked nervously through the headphones.
“No, the full take was excellent.”
Murakami’s voice tried its best to maintain a producer’s authority, but Kato keenly detected the barely contained excitement and ecstasy in his tone.
“You’ve found the feeling perfectly. Let’s strike while the iron is hot and start the official recording immediately. First, let’s do the A section. This time, you can take the tempo a bit more leisurely.”
“Okay!”
—
Several hours later, standing in front of the record company building, idol Hoshino Haruka would recall that morning when Ritsu took her to the recording studio.
She finally understood why a four-minute song required an entire morning, or even a whole day, in the studio.
The full take just now was at most a warm-up; the real recording was the main event.
It was an extremely stringent, appalling industrial-grade polishing.
“Or torture,” Haruka said as she lay on the back seat of the minibus.