Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir

Nutshell description: composer Eric Whitacre invited the public to submit YouTube videos of themselves singing a part for a choral piece, then put all the submissions together. The result sounds pretty good.

Keep in mind as you're listening to this that most of the submissions were done with laptop microphones.

Here's the first version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7o7BrlbaDs

The first experiment turned out so well that he did it again, and this time had over 2,000 participants from 58 countries. Just try to imagine a 2,000-track mix! (It was mixed on a Pyramix system.) 

Here's Virtual Choir 2.0: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WhWDCw3Mng

Here's the story from Eric's blog.

Here's an interview by Dave Chick on his Inside Home Recording podcast with the engineer who supervised the mix project, Steve Long of Floating Earth Studios, a studio/post/remote audio service in London.

He said there was little processing (how could you with that many tracks?). Although the end result is remarkable given the sources, I'd be curious to know how (or why) they let so much sibilance through the process. Maybe it's a YouTube artifact? Maybe they didn't have SpitFish?

On a regular basis, folks ask for advice here on beefing up their vocals, such as today's thread on this forum posted by Serenarules. And every time the same advice is offered: double-tracking. Well, if you ever doubted the magic of overdubbing the same part, Eric's virtual choir should dramatically underscore the concept.

Next time somebody says, oh you've got to have a $2000 preamp and a $4000 microphone, and by golly then it'll sound phat - just remember that this choir was mostly recorded with laptop microphones.

Wow that's amazing,cool Dave. Monster collab.

Thanks for this, bit!  What an amazing result.  I'd heard about this, but it never seemed worth checking out.  How wrong I was!
 
The first thing that struck me about the first one was how young all the participants were.  Well, actually the first thing that struck me was how young and handsome Mr. Whitacre himself was ... what an a**hole. 
 
But back to the age thing, it almost seemed as if there was a no-one-over-30 requirement.  We did see a few older faces in the 2.0 version.  If you sing in choral groups as I do, you'll be acutely aware at how old community choruses tend to be ... well at least in the US.  It must be much nicer in places like the UK where there's a stronger ongoing choral tradition.
 
I was particularly pleased that the 2.0 piece was "Night".  A group I'm in performed that last year.  It's scrumptious when listening but even more involving to get to sing it.

Thats so awesome!

dmbaer

Chappel


How many people over 30 in your singing groups have uploaded videos to YouTube of themselves performing?

No idea.  I sing in the chorus of a regional opera company with some incredibly talented younger singers, so probably at least a few of them have posted their efforts on-line.  My other chorus is mostly older ladies ... they're not likely to have done that (and everyone should be glad they haven't).  
 
But you're right, that's probably a big factor in the average age of the virtual choir.  While older singers probably have access to the equipment to load their auditions, very few of them would actually know how, whereas 90% of high school singers probably could do that in their sleep.

Sure... that's my point. I don't believe there was any kind of age discrimination going on, only that is it likely that a much higher percentage of younger people were were willing to be involved in the project and were already set up for it. And those younger people are the older people of the future, so I think that one of these days these kinds of online collaborative projects will be more balanced when it comes to age.