Slashdot Mirror
The Virtual Choir Project
An anonymous reader writes "Conductor and composer Eric Whitacre has successfully created a virtual choir using the voices of 185 people who posted their performance on YouTube. The piece that's performed is called 'Sleep,' composed by the conductor himself in 2000. Anyone can join in — all you need is a webcam and a microphone."
This is an amazing performance, coordinating hundred of people around the world, people who will never meet, but are working together to bring to life a project.
Internet is not just for porn, facebook and WoW you know.
EULA : By reading the above message, you agree that I now own your soul.
Not sure exactly about the filtering, but I know that the singing was recorded with the performers listening and matching with headphones on. I also know there was a TON of entries to get into this video. Whitacre has almost a cult following in the choral world, and many people jumped at the chance. It could be that one of the ways they selected the vocalists was to throw out poor audio files.
This is an old trick, just record in studio (people's homes) and then put it all together for the final mix.
But still, there is something brilliant and beautiful about this. Not that it reinvents anything, but it does a great job of demonstrating this trick to a new generation of people who can take interest and see what else they can achieve with it.
Originality in art is highly overrated.
All the originality in the world doesn't mean a damn if it doesn't touch someone's heart. This piece is pretty moving.
Listen to the otherworldly ambiance created by the blending of so many varied different recordings by so many different microphones in so many different spaces. This odd effect almost becomes an additional voice itself. The video aspect doesn't do much for me, except to remind me of the fractured and disconnected nature of the multitude of individual recordings, mixed together.
In my music, I use convolution a lot to create space, from the inside of my mouth to the middle of a lake. It never occurred to me that by blending so many individual elements you would come up with this, I guess, hyperspace reverb.
It reminds me a bit of Heinrich Goebbels' Surrogate Cities.
I mean, it's not exactly Miles'Agartha, or the first Stooges album, or even Wagner's Parsifal, but it ain't bad. Not at all.
Bravo.
You are welcome on my lawn.
In the end, how it was made is not really that important.
But the end result is quite beautiful. And making something beautiful, today, is no small thing.
The guy deserves credit for that. Points for execution, points for conception, but it's beauty, FTW.
You are welcome on my lawn.
... and suddenly you miss the whole point of doing it.
Yes. Choirs have been singing together for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Name one other point in history where a whole amateur choir can sing together, from their own homes, without ever being in the same physical space as one another.
This isn't about expediency. It's about exploring a new medium. You might not get that, if you work at the level of switches & cabling, but what we're creating out of these mundane realities is a whole new way of working together. It's like Gutenberg, looking at the printing press and saying "Yay for stamping ink. You could have just gone down to the local monastery and gotten the monks to copy it."