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."

Comments

Crowdsourcing made cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pro musicians have been recording tracks asynchronously for ages. The difference is that instead of having a tiny video likeness of themselves put on a YouTube video, they got paid.

Eric Whitacre is doing some neat things

[DesertJazz]

The composer, Eric Whitacre, has been doing quite a few cool new things integrating multi-media into his works recently. This internet video is the biggest one so far, and I find it absolutely amazing how the project came off. The person who did the video editing did a great job. It's been talked about on CNN, BBC, and now much more imporantly Slashdot! ;-) He's got a pretty faithful following on Facebook.

If you're into music at all check out some of his compositions. I'm a band person (director), but his choral stuff is amazing. He's also transcribed many of his pieces (including this one) into band works and written a number of orchestral pieces. (October is by far my favorite)

Beautiful

[DoofusOfDeath]

Normally I flinch at new choral / orchestral music from the past 100 years or so, because it's struck me as avante gard and distonal compared to Beethoven et al.

But this performance is just beautiful. I love it.

Re:Beautiful

[dkleinsc]

Eric Whitacre really knows his stuff, which is what makes his music fun to sing and listen. Some stuff he does really well:
  - Create a sort of choral shimmer using notes that are really close to each other. That's a technique that's been really developed in the last 100 years.
  - Use the lower registers of the voices. A lot of composers go with faster-higher-louder to create excitement, but Whitacre has no problem dropping the basses to their low register for something completely different.
  - Choosing his words carefully, and matching them to his musical intentions.
  - Making his lines fairly easy to sing, so the singers have a good chance of really nailing their parts.

And if you've skipped most of the last century's worth of orchestral and choral music, you've missed a lot of really interesting styles. The way to think about it is that there was a lot of experimentation, and some things worked and a lot of things didn't work. Interestingly, now that composers know more about what doesn't work, they've been recently doing more of what does work.

Re:Beautiful

[Rheostatik]

Not to mention beautiful and exciting works of art Music really started going down hill in the mid-century, when it became too academic. There still is some good stuff out there, however.

Re:Beautiful

[frog_strat]

the atonal mess

Some of us like this stuff. Try playing top 40 stuff over and over to help make it through college. Anyone with a brain will eventually want to hear some fresh and unusual ideas. Schoenberg, Bartok, Webern, Ligeti.

Filtering?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to know how much the audio was manipulated. There's no way you could get that many YouTube videos together and not hear air conditioners running, dogs yapping, babies crying, TVs playing, dishes clanging, microphone hits, etc. whether incidental or not. Add to that the differing audio quality between each person's rig and you'd expect a lot more of a cacophonous result.