Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir Tour

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The “Virtual Choir Tour 2011″ is now accepting submissions! American composer, Eric Whitacre, tells Lisa Mullins about his effort to set a new world record for the largest number of people singing in an online choir. Download MP3

The World’s Alex Gallafent auditions for the Virtual Choir. Alex wishes to apologise for sounding like a vacuum cleaner.

Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir – ‘Lux Aurumque’

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LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World. Composer Eric Whitacre has his sights set on a new world record for the number of people singing together on-line. Now everybody’s welcome to take part in this virtual choir, provided you have a webcam, and you follow a few rules.

ERIC WHITACRE: And now a few instructions for recording your track. First, make sure that your face is well lit, nice and bright. Please make sure that your clothes are only black.

MULLINS: That is Eric Whitacre speaking on the instructional video for this virtual choir. You can find it on YouTube, and at our website, TheWorld.org. People from several countries around the globe have already joined the composer’s virtual choir. I took a look at it a little bit earlier today, Eric. You have in the choir that you already put together, how man people taking part?

WHITACRE:  In this video there’s 185 singers from 12 different countries.

MULLINS:  Mostly US heavy, I notice.

WHITACRE: Yeah, that’s right. Although we’re hoping with the next one that it’ll be much more globally represented.

MULLINS: And in order to set a new world record for this song, for the next [INDISCERNIBLE], how many people do you expect to get or how many are you going to shoot for?

WHITACRE: We officially need 900 singers because the first video went viral and has had over a million views so far, we think we can potentially have thousands of singers for the next version.

MULLINS: Are you ready for that, Eric?

WHITACRE: One way or another, I will be ready.

MULLINS: You’ll be ready, okay. So, the clip we played just a moment ago, we heard you walking people through how to record themselves singing. In the first version, one of the interesting aspects of it was that people had different kind of lighting, they had different clothing, they looked entirely different. Some were very much mad up, some apparently weren’t. But you link them all together on YouTube and – or I guess, they then uplink their clip to YouTube, but tell us from start to finish, very briefly, how this all works.

WHITACRE: So I upload a video of myself conducting the piece and then they sit in front of the webcam, they’ve got the sheet music in front of them as a download from my site, and they sing to my conducting video alone in their own rooms, and once they’ve recorded that video, they upload it to YouTube. And then for the last video, a young man named Scott Haines, cut all of it together and made this virtual choir.

MULLINS:  Let’s listen to a bit of it now. 185 voices is what we’re hearing here. When you put this together in post-production, what we’re seeing on the screen anyway, is 185 little pixels, little squares with these people with headphones on singing in their various places in the world and in the United States. And then you separately conducting. But I imagine not everybody has a good voice.

WHITACRE: The effort that it takes to download the music, learn it, and then upload a 5 minute of yourself singing completely alone, that process alone seems to weed out anyone who really couldn’t sing it. So we didn’t turn down a single singer.

MULLINS: Okay, so for people who want to perhaps help you break the world record, or at least sing along with Eric, what’s the cut-off date for anybody who wants to take part in this international virtual choir that you’re just launching today, right?

WHITACRE: That’s right. Today’s the launch date. They have until December 31^st to upload their video, but we would encourage them to do it much earlier than that. It’ll take us a couple months to cut it all together once we got it, then we’ll premiere the new video in the spring.

MULLINS: Thank you very much, Eric Whitacre.

WHITACRE: Thank you so much, Lisa.

MULLINS: Please don’t ask why, but we asked our own Alex Gallafent to try his hand at submitting a video for inclusion in the virtual choir. He did wear black, he sang some. You be the judge for this audition. The video’s at TheWorld.org.

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