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

Absolutely

[imamac]

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

Re:Absolutely

[drosboro]

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".

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.

Re:I disagree

[ProfMobius]

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.

Wrong piece

[Logarhythmic]

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.

Re:Filtering?

[DesertJazz]

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.

Nothing new, nothing unusual, still awesome.

[Senes]

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:I disagree

[PopeRatzo]

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.

Re:I disagree

[Corporate Drone]

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?

Re:Yay...

[ahankinson]

... 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."