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."
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)
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.
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.
"Before criticizing someone, first walk a mile in his shoes. Then, you'll be a mile away... and you'll have his shoes."
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.
I am officially gone from
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.
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".