The Virtual Choir: Watch a Choir Conductor Digitally Unite 3500 Singers from Around the World

For decades we’ve been hear­ing promis­es about how com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy will one day elim­i­nate dis­tance itself, mak­ing every­one around the globe feel as if they might as well be in the same room. Such a future would have its down­side as well as its upside, but even now, approach­ing the third decade of the 21st cen­tu­ry, it has­n’t quite arrived yet. Nev­er­the­less, we’ve already grown so used to the idea of real-time glob­al col­lab­o­ra­tion that it takes an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly ambi­tious project to let us step back and appre­ci­ate the tech­no­log­i­cal real­i­ty that makes it pos­si­ble. Take, for exam­ple, con­duc­tor Eric Whitacre’s Vir­tu­al Choir, whose per­for­mance of Whitacre’s own piece “Lux Arumque” appears above.

“Vir­tu­al,” here, is a bit of a mis­nomer, encour­ag­ing as it does Gib­son­ian visions of the 100-per­cent dig­i­tal voic­es of syn­thet­ic singers res­onat­ing pure­ly in cyber­space. And while Whitacre’s project would­n’t have been pos­si­ble with­out stream­ing dig­i­tal audio and video tech­nol­o­gy — as well as the infra­struc­ture of what we may as well still call cyber­space — it begins with the real voic­es of 100-per­cent ana­log humans.

185 such humans, to be pre­cise, based in twelve coun­tries, and all of them vis­i­ble on their sep­a­rate screens as Whitacre plays the role of con­duc­tor on his own. The much larg­er-scale per­for­mance of “Water Night,” a piece com­posed for the poet­ry of Octavio Paz, brings togeth­er 3,746 videos from 73 coun­tries, neces­si­tat­ing a cred­its sequence longer than the piece itself.

The Vir­tu­al Choir grew, as many such immense works do, from a small seed: “It all start­ed with this one young girl who sent me this video of her­self singing one of my choral pieces,” says Whitacre in this video on the prepa­ra­tion for the Vir­tu­al Choir’s “Sleep” video. “I was struck so hard by the beau­ty, the inti­ma­cy of it, the sweet­ness of it, and I thought, ‘Boy, it would be amaz­ing if we could get 100 peo­ple to do this and cut it all togeth­er.” The expe­ri­ence of assem­bling this vir­tu­al choir, or even hear­ing it, shows that “singing togeth­er and mak­ing music togeth­er is a fun­da­men­tal human expe­ri­ence,” and on a scale hard­ly imag­in­able a gen­er­a­tion or two ago. But on the most basic lev­el, even this new way of mak­ing music is mere­ly an expan­sion of the old­est way of mak­ing music: with one human voice, then anoth­er, and anoth­er.

via Swiss Miss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

30 Fans Joy­ous­ly Sing the Entire­ty of Bob Marley’s Leg­end Album in Uni­son

25 John Lennon Fans Sing His Album Work­ing Class Hero Word for Word, and Note for Note

Pat­ti Smith Sings “Peo­ple Have the Pow­er” with a Choir of 250 Fel­low Singers

Watch David Byrne Lead a Mas­sive Choir in Singing David Bowie’s “Heroes”

Watch Choirs Around the World Sim­u­late the Rain­storm in Toto’s “Africa” Using Only Their Hands

Bri­an Eno Lists the Ben­e­fits of Singing: A Long Life, Increased Intel­li­gence, and a Sound Civ­i­liza­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or Face­book.