Hiura Kuro Tries Singing Without Hearing His Own Reverb, Then Switches It Back

NEO-PORTE — Hiura Kuro, a singer with Neo-Porte, started a karaoke stream on Sunday with a changed setup: viewers would hear his voice with reverb, but he would hear it dry. He had said he suspected singing against a dry voice would be easier, and that the reverb mostly just felt good. He sang the first song that way, then put the echo back in his own ears before the song was over. Singing without it, he said, felt strange, and he did not return to the dry setting.

Before the first song he had also said he drank rice oil straight from the small packet that comes with an instant noodle meal, on the theory that oily food helps before singing, and added that the amount was tiny. Early on he introduced the new bread and grass emotes on his channel, and chat filled with them. One Super Chat came in, and he read it near the end of the stream.

“It feels weird if I don’t have my own reverb bouncing back at me.” — Hiura Kuro, after the first verse

The set ran through anime songs and others. About half an hour in he took on a theme from the anime A Certain Magical Index, a song he said he had not heard in years, and lost his place in the melody. He called it rare for him to get that lost. Later came a song he called an easy one to sing, a number from the artist Sumika, then IN_MY_HEAD, and a song he called cool but hard to sing because of its sudden drops in pitch. For the next number he said he would lower the key by one step, since he thought it would suit him better.

Between songs the talk turned to Naruto. He said he had wanted to watch it again after hearing about a new anime adaptation, and that he would want a son of his to read it, though he said he has no son. He sang a Naruto theme, Silhouette, saying it is a song about family and that he would sing it picturing his own father. He said he had lately started to see his father’s face in his own when he wakes up. Later he looked up the best-selling manga outside Japan and read out the list: One Piece first at 600 million copies, Golgo 13 second at 300 million, then Detective Conan, Dragon Ball and Naruto.

Chat joined in throughout. When he went to check the door lock and found it already locked, viewers joked that a ghost had done it. He closed the stream after about an hour and 38 minutes of singing and talk, repeating that the dry-voice experiment had lasted only a moment.