The Virtual Choir Project 58
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."
Absolutely (Score:3, Funny)
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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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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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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 nigh
Of course it's about opnions. (Score:2)
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.
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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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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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http://www.amazon.com/Eric-Whitacre-Cloudburst-Other-Choral/dp/B000E1XOUS [amazon.com]
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 [amazon.com]
Their CD singing Whitacre's stuff isn't bad, but Lux Aeterna is truly awesome.
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Great stuff. Thanks.
Re:I disagree (Score:4, Insightful)
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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Wasn't the reverb added afterwards?
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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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Re:Absolutely (Score:4, 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".
World's first? (Score:1, Funny)
I think niconico would take offense... oh wait, "made with youtube", yeah, that's probably a first.
some badass cinematography (Score:2)
I would not have thought of to do it that way. What an elegant way to compose all the videos. Bravo!
Crowdsourcing made cool. (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.
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Eric Whitacre is doing some neat things (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
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Beautiful (Score:3, 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 (Score:4, 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 [youtube.com] interesting [youtube.com] styles [youtube.com]. 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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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.
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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.
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the atonal mess
see:
the atonal mess that largely dominated the mid-to-late 20th century
Wrong piece (Score:3, Informative)
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Filtering? (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.
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Nothing new, nothing unusual, still awesome. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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...
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... 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 o
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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 [myspace.com]? They're only a dozen, but they're a virtual choir and have been recording/performing for a few years now.
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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.
When they go on tour ... (Score:1)
Nice but... (Score:2)
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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 avat
immortality (Score:1)