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."
Wrong piece (Score:3, Informative)
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".
Re:I disagree (Score:3, 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?
Re:Yay... (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 [myspace.com]? They're only a dozen, but they're a virtual choir and have been recording/performing for a few years now.