Yumi Matsutoya, known affectionately as “Yuming,” has never stopped looking ahead. Over a 54-year career that has made her one of Japan’s most beloved musicians — with more than 42 million records sold and a treasured place in the Studio Ghibli soundtrack canon — she has treated technological shifts not as a threats but as invitations.
In the early 1980s, she was one of the first major Japanese pop stars to experiment with digital synthesizers, folding their tones into her songwriting as naturally as if they had always belonged there.
Her 40th studio album, “Wormhole,” finds the 71-year-old artist testing the latest potentially epoch-defining technology: artificial intelligence. Her interest in AI began a few years ago, when researchers at the University of Tokyo approached her with a proposal to reconstruct her voice as it sounded in the early 1970s, when she debuted under the name Yumi Arai. Working with previously unreleased vocal takes from that period, she created “” in 2022, a song that plays like a quiet duet between present and past. It was one of the first songs to prominently feature AI-assisted vocals, and helped spark the concept for “Wormhole,” which arrives at a moment when the technology is both commonplace and fiercely debated.
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