Eric Whitacre Virtual Choirs
Virtual Choirs
In 2008 Eric Whitacre received a video from a girl singing a part of one of his pieces. The video inspired him to start his famous “Virtual Choir” project. “Virtual Choir” integrates and organizes videos of singers from all over the world and combines them into a choir by using technology to sync the voices.
The way it works is that Eric announces a virtual choir project. He sends out a video with instructions and him conducting.
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Singers practice and then record themselves and send in their videos.
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Eric and his team combine the videos into a virtual choir. With each virtual choir the number of singers has increased and the graphics and story line have become more impressive and complicated
Eric has created seven virtual choir projects:
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Lux Aurumque - featured one hundred and eighty five singers from over ten countries
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Sleep - featured over two thousand singers from over fifty eight countries
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Water Night - combined 3,746 submissions from 73 countries and it was released on the hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.
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Fly to Paradise - contains 8,409 videos from 5,905 people from 101 different countries. It launched at the Coronation Festival at Buckingham Palace on July 11, 2013.
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Glow - features 1473 singers, representing all 50 American States and was written especially for the Disney World of Color – Winter Dreams show
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What If - Virtual Youth Choir featuring 2,292 young singers from 80 countries across the world. It premiered at the opening ceremony of the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games
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Deep Field - Virtual Choir 5 features 8,000 singers from 120 countries and video footage from the Hubble Space Telescope. You didn't have to be able to read music to participate in Virtual Choir 5 and there was a STEAM curriculum to accompany the project.
TED Talks
Eric has given two TED talks about the Virtual Choirs. In 2011 he talked about the idea and how he made it work and at TED 2013, Eric conducted a real-time Live Virtual Choir, performing live from 28 countries around the globe, alongside a 100 personchoir on stage, streamed live through Skype.