Collective beauty

What happens when 185 voices from 12 countries are combined on 243 tracks into one virtual choir?

Something truly beautiful:

If you’ve time and the bandwidth, I highly recommend that you go straight to the YouTube page and watch this in at least 480p, so that you can see the faces. These are not made up and costumed performers, but people sitting at their computers in their homes and offices, contributing their voices to a result they could not hear until the video was posted.

Eric Whitacre, the person behind this virtual choir experiment, announced the project in a July 2009 entry on his blog:

I’d like to take the virtual choir a step further, and see if we can really start to make some delicate, nuanced music together. Our goal this time will be to sing with unified dynamics, vowels, and cutoffs, and to use only a conductor and a piano reduction as our guide.

First, I’ll record a conductor track this week, with me conducting and a friend playing the reduction on the piano. I’ll also record a separate video where I’ll discuss the piece, and try to illustrate a few musical concepts that everyone should try to achieve while performing their individual parts.

Charles Anthony Silvestri will post a video talking about his translation of the text. He’ll also speak each of the words with pure, perfect Latin vowels.

Then, Scottie will make individual part videos, one side of the screen showing the sheet music for the part you’ve selected to sing (soprano, alto, tenor, or bass) and one half of the screen with my conductor track.

If you’re interested in auditioning for the soprano solo, you’ll just post a video of the first eight measures of the piece, singing the solo in measures 5-8. We’ll choose our favorite and it will appear in the final video.

Many of those video auditions are also on YouTube (look in the Related Videos column). I think the ability to make such a magnificent whole out of many little parts like these is one of the most extraordinary aspects of the human mind.

Via Sullivan.