The Virtual Choir

Today’s site is actually a section of composer Eric Whitacre’s site.  The Virtual Choir Project involves getting people to record themselves singing, and then stitching all the separate voices together to achieve a choir effect.  Whitacre got this idea after seeing a Youtube video of a young soprano singing one of his pieces, entitled “Sleep”, which he had written in 2000.

The first piece that was attempted in this project was in fact the same song “Sleep”, in which singers all over the world sang along to without any musical instrumental accompaniment.  Scott Haines then volunteered to edit the piece to achieve the choir effect from the various single voices.

Seeing the success that this had, Whitacre decided to do it once again with the piece Lux Aurumque.  However, this time he decided to make his own conductor track and offered the sheet music as a free download.  Watch and hear the amazing final result in the video below, achieved through 185 voices from 12 different countries.  Once again, the editing was done by Scott Haines.

This is what Whitacre had to say after this success:

“When I saw the finished video for the first time I actually teared up. The intimacy of all the faces, the sound of the singing, the obvious poetic symbolism about our shared humanity and our need to connect; all of it completely overwhelmed me.”

So are there any future plans?  To this, Whitaker says, “I’m hoping that this is just the beginning. My ultimate goal is to write an original piece for the Virtual Choir and have it receive its world premiere in cyber-space, hundreds (maybe thousands) of people singing alone, together.”

We wait in anticipation for the next choir piece.  This will for sure keep us checking continuously for any updates from Whitacre!

Access The Virtual Choir at http://ericwhitacre.com/the-virtual-choir

Read more on how this was achieved on http://ericwhitacre.com/blog/the-virtual-choir-how-we-did-it