The Virtual Choir Project

Absolutely by imamac · 2010-05-03 11:57 · Score: 2, Funny

one of the coolest things I've seen in a while. Coming from a guy with a music degree.)

Re:Absolutely by drosboro · 2010-05-03 14:44 · Score: 3, Informative

Yes, it's really, really cool. I'm a choir director, and we performed this piece a year or two ago. It's incredibly ambitious to even think of doing something like this across social media - it's not an easy piece to conduct, so it wouldn't be easy to keep the singers synced with each other. You can hear a bit of that any time there's an ending consonant (e.g. on "lux" throughout the piece). Nevertheless, he's created some amazing art with this already great composition.
And, to echo someone else's sentiments below - the piece is "Lux Aurumque", not "Sleep".
Re:Absolutely by imamac · 2010-05-04 01:45 · Score: 1

Oh, I also have a second degree in Managment of Health Informatics and am almost done with a Masters in Healthcare Administration. I'm not worried about the very unlikely chance of being unemployed.

World's first? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-05-03 12:03 · Score: 1, Funny

I think niconico would take offense... oh wait, "made with youtube", yeah, that's probably a first.

Re:I disagree by Corporate+Drone · 2010-05-03 12:31 · Score: 1

Well... what else is out there, where a conductor took hundreds of choral parts, recorded solo, and stitched them together both for sight and sound, creating a single, sync'ed whole choral piece?

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some badass cinematography by Khashishi · 2010-05-03 12:32 · Score: 1

I would not have thought of to do it that way. What an elegant way to compose all the videos. Bravo!

Of course it's about opnions. by IANAAC · 2010-05-03 12:34 · Score: 1

It's not cool. It's entirely not original. Can someone explain in what way they think it is?

I can tell you why *I* think it's cool:

Unlike something like, say, what Kutiman does, this uses willing participants, knowing beforehand the part they'll be playing in the overall scheme. These aren't "found" sounds.

And it has nice production value, too.

Crowdsourcing made cool. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-05-03 12:46 · Score: 1, Interesting

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.

Re:Crowdsourcing made cool. by Ginger+Unicorn · 2010-05-03 23:59 · Score: 1

sneering is a sign of insecurity

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Eric Whitacre is doing some neat things by DesertJazz · 2010-05-03 12:50 · Score: 3, Interesting

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)

Re:Eric Whitacre is doing some neat things by The_Wilschon · 2010-05-03 15:37 · Score: 1

You should also check out his new opera/theater/electronica thing called Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings. I recently (warning: shameless bragging ahead) heard him promote it from the stage at Carnegie Hall, where I performed later that evening.

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Beautiful by DoofusOfDeath · 2010-05-03 12:52 · Score: 2, Interesting

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 by dkleinsc · 2010-05-03 13:15 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

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Re:Beautiful by Rheostatik · 2010-05-03 15:21 · Score: 1

You're mistaken. Choral music has largely escaped the atonal mess that largely dominated the mid-to-late 20th century. Most choral composers know how to write music effectively, music that doesn't cater to their own egotistical desire to "push the boundaries", or to the expectations and wishes of a Ph.D supervisor.

Not saying all contemporary instrumental is crap...there's lots of good stuff out there, to be honest. But contemporary choral music, probably due to the medium, is so much more accessible.
Re:Beautiful by Rheostatik · 2010-05-03 15:32 · Score: 2, Interesting

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 by frog_strat · 2010-05-04 04:14 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.
Re:Beautiful by Rheostatik · 2010-05-04 15:21 · Score: 1

the atonal mess

see:

the atonal mess that largely dominated the mid-to-late 20th century

Re:I disagree by ProfMobius · 2010-05-03 12:53 · Score: 3, Insightful

It is exactly what internet is about. Taking pieces and bit from different willing people, and make something greater than just the sum of the parts.

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.

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Wrong piece by Logarhythmic · 2010-05-03 12:58 · Score: 3, Informative

The piece in the video is called Lux Aurumque, not Sleep. I've actually performed a wind ensemble version of this piece -- it's extremely difficult due to the very delicate and exposed parts, but Whitacre's music is just gorgeous.

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Re:Wrong piece by clawsonb · 2010-05-04 03:59 · Score: 1

Indeed, I've preformed Sleep myself and have heard this one preformed before. I was expecting a different piece when I played the video. Not that I'm disappointed however, both are beautiful pieces, and it was really amazing to see something like this actually work out. As one without the time available to practice with a real choir anymore, this would be a great way to get to sing with others.

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Filtering? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-05-03 13:11 · Score: 1, Interesting

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.

Re:Filtering? by DesertJazz · 2010-05-03 13:18 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.
Re:Filtering? by fbjon · 2010-05-03 23:53 · Score: 1

For starters, there is a massive (but quite good) reverb laid on top. Besides the obvious, it has the same effect as soft focus for photos: blends together, smoothes out minor blemishes. Continuous hiss and room noise is not that difficult to remove, although I can still hear some in there. Finally, each individual voice/video doesn't contribute much by itself to the final output, as is expected in a choir. If there's 100 voices, the spurious background noises will be tiny in comparison to the whole.

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Nothing new, nothing unusual, still awesome. by Senes · 2010-05-03 13:24 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

Re:Nothing new, nothing unusual, still awesome. by YourExperiment · 2010-05-03 20:16 · Score: 1

This is an old trick, just record in studio (people's homes) and then put it all together for the final mix.
How dare you! This isn't just a bunch of separate studio takes stuck together, this is a virtual choir! Oh wait...

Re:I disagree by PopeRatzo · 2010-05-03 14:02 · Score: 3, Insightful

It's entirely not original.

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.

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Re:I disagree by PopeRatzo · 2010-05-03 14:05 · Score: 1, Insightful

It is exactly what internet is about.

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.

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You are welcome on my lawn.

Re:I disagree by ProfMobius · 2010-05-03 14:31 · Score: 1

I totally agree. This is an amazing piece of work. I need to grab the full discography to put while working.

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Re:I disagree by iamhassi · 2010-05-03 15:00 · Score: 1

The Virtual Choir Project was done better than the Youtube Symphony. Maybe if they would have separated different instruments into their own sections and we could see them all play at once with the rest of the orchestrate it would be more impressive.

The Virtual Choir Project is a WIN because you can see everyone, at once, the entire time while they sing. It's like watching a real choir instead of a few frames of individuals like the Youtube Symphony.

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When they go on tour ... by 517714 · 2010-05-03 15:28 · Score: 1

being a roadie will either be the worst job in history ... or one of the easiest.

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Nice but... by grumpyman · 2010-05-03 16:16 · Score: 1

Very cool but tons of post effects and editing. If this can happen in real-time that'll be awesome.

Re:Nice but... by RJFerret · 2010-05-04 03:53 · Score: 1

Not technically "real-time" but certainly live...a few years ago I attended a live music performance in Second Life where the trio were around the world, one in Tokyo, one in Georgia, one in a city in Canada doing vocals/harmonica, keyboard and guitar all together.
They used software that allowed the subsequent performers to hear the first's stream and mix them together for the next. They also had themselves on video (ustream) so you could choose your own camera and watch them all separately from their avatars on stage in Second Life.
There were nearly 100 people in the audience enjoying their improvisations. (To give credit, I believe Komuso came up with the idea of combining all the technologies...the other performers I think were Noma and Hathead iirc.)

Re:I disagree by Corporate+Drone · 2010-05-03 17:24 · Score: 2, Informative

wait -- are you being serious? The YouTube Symphony was simply a mechanism to collect auditions; their performance was live, as a group, (certainly) rehearsed as a group, and, although well done, not groundbreaking in any "virtual" way.

On the other hand, this choir "performance" is actually the combination of individual performances, done all at the singers' locations, without group rehearsal, and combined into a "virtual" performance, which we get to hear and see in real-time.

The differences are like night and day -- are you seriously not seeing the originality of the approach here?

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Re:Yay... by ahankinson · 2010-05-03 17:28 · Score: 2, Insightful

... 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."

Re:Yay... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-05-03 19:16 · Score: 1, Informative

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

How about the Cavern Choir? They're only a dozen, but they're a virtual choir and have been recording/performing for a few years now.

Re:I disagree by somersault · 2010-05-03 21:56 · Score: 1

http://www.amazon.com/Eric-Whitacre-Cloudburst-Other-Choral/dp/B000E1XOUS

Got it a couple of years ago while looking for Polyphony stuff after hearing them on the radio :) Even better is

http://www.amazon.com/Morten-Lauridsen-Lux-aeterna/dp/B0007GP69W/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1272966899&sr=1-1

Their CD singing Whitacre's stuff isn't bad, but Lux Aeterna is truly awesome.

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Re:I disagree by PopeRatzo · 2010-05-04 00:04 · Score: 1

Great stuff. Thanks.

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Re:Yay... by ahankinson · 2010-05-04 00:49 · Score: 1

I would actually lump them in with "this point in history." I'm certainly not saying that this is the first time it's happened, but you don't have to be first to be considered a pioneer.

immortality by gert+cuykens · 2010-05-04 05:57 · Score: 1

be part of something that can not die

Re:I disagree by wondershit · 2010-05-04 08:21 · Score: 1

Dude, you mean Heiner Goebbels. Heinrich Goebbels is the nazi child of Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels.

Re:I disagree by Twinbee · 2010-05-04 09:14 · Score: 1

Wasn't the reverb added afterwards?

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Re:I disagree by lkeagle · 2010-05-04 19:51 · Score: 1

As an audio engineer, it would certainly be my opinion that these tracks were highly processed after mixing, and possibly before. The amount of noise and distortion from hundreds of cheap laptop/webcam microphones would be horrific. I'm certain they used a noise reduction filter, and an awful lot of additional ambiance/reverb to mask the sonic artifacts.

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