Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir 4: Fly to Paradise
A Crowdsourced choir — what a fantastic idea. To have the ability to build a choir from as far as the web can reach is really thinking outside the box for music. I believe there is much unchartered territory in music, but who would think a choir would keep pushing the boundaries? In this particular project alone, the voices of over 5,000 people are blended into this single piece.
This video has started making its rounds in my circle and I felt the need to pass it along. The song itself was produced by Guy Sigsworth, and perfectly matches the feeling behind this video.
With a virtual choir, there are no physical space limitations, time constraints, or location concerns. Eric Whitacre has brought the talent of people from over 100 countries together and the result is something amazing. I can only imagine the connection and sense of pride to be involved in this project — to see the final result of collaboration like this must leave those involved with such an incredible feeling.
The video (while pretty quirky), really brings the whole idea together here. The production was fantastic both with the audio as well as the video integration; the video itself is a work of art on its own. They managed to integrate the video recordings of the participants into such a creative and beautiful way that it really tends to steal your focus from the fantastic audio production – you can certainly get lost here. There are a few other projects in this ‘Virtual Choir” series by Eric Whitacre (here), but this is by far the most impressive both visually and vocally. I like the progression I’ve seen from these projects in both quality and scale, and I’m definitely going to keep a lookout for the next in this series.
Take what you want from this. I want to bring inspiration. That’s the purpose of these short artist write-ups that I provide. Sometimes they are different and sometimes it might seem generic, but the purpose is to bring something new to the table — maybe something unique.
I’d love to see this pushed even further with a livestream event, synchronizing the voices of thousands – live.
Update: Here’s a link to a fairly recent Reddit AMA – I am Eric Whitacre