The Virtual Choir

David Clover  22 October 2010 16:27:09

I've been working in the computer field for a very long time and it is astonishing how what is now commonplace was formerly completely unthinkable.

I submitted my track for Eric Whitacre's 'Virtual Choir' last October. The video is now released. The novelty is that each singer never meets the others. Whilst that wouldn't do for every choir (you'd never make any friends) it shows how something so extraordinary has become astonishingly simple with the advent of 'Web 2' technology (though I probably shouldn't call it that any more).

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The first Virtual Choir performance (which I wasn't in)

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Here's the web-syndicated TED talk where Eric Whitacre talks about the first and second recordings - featuring my own 'mature' contribution at about 8:50

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Here's The final video

 
Online collaboration is the big story across IT, SME and large business, and it's quite remarkable that we can even collaborate at an abstracted artistic level in something worthwhile and meaningful to produce excellent results. I believe that there is a real lesson to be learned here, not just for musicians but for every aspect of business and private life in terms of what can be achieved through collaborating in simple ways.

Back to the music. The conductor explains the music and then conducts it over the Internet. The result of the first such venture 'Lux Aurumque' has had 1,384,876 views at the time of writing.

What's even more remarkable is that for Scott Haines (interviewed here) the first recording was his first venture into video editing using Adobe's After Effects software putting in some 1000 hours of work to achieve an astonishingly seamless result. A newcomer to the software, he has achieved what only professional video editors could have done previously.

It looks as though the new recording has used more sophisticated editing techniques.

Maybe you know someone who can join the Virtual Choir too!

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