# The Virtual Choir



## Tikoo Tuba (Oct 15, 2018)

17,000 voices in one choir ? Having heard a sample of the mix , I do not have a good opinion of this virtual music so far . Oh , is synthetic love being sold ? And this is for the healing of the alienated .

And tech has a remedy for the healing of pitches , eh :

_"Whether it is every single note being adjusted, or just a few notes throughout the song that need help, the overall goal is to make the vocal sound as great AND as natural as you can. When done correctly, you shouldn't even be able to notice that the vocal has been tuned!"_


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## cheregi (Jul 16, 2020)

17,000 voices???? is this something i can actually listen to??

conceptually this reminds me of 'black midi', where digital keyboards are absolutely overloaded with sheer quantity of note-inputs such that the sound starts to glitch in interesting ways.


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## Tikoo Tuba (Oct 15, 2018)

https://ericwhitacre.com/the-virtual-choir

Individual recorded samples are collected . Each singer is alone in a studio . Sometimes a dog chimes in . Likely such samples are relegated to the distant background chorus . You may hear some chosen voices dominant and up front in the mix . I do . Yes , the chaos glitch must be there somewhere , a child wailing , a bird calling ... sublime .


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## Tikoo Tuba (Oct 15, 2018)

Are the concepts of virtuous and virtual being literally confounded . The virtual choir is being sold to you as love .


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## pianozach (May 21, 2018)

During the recording process of *The Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows*, *John Lennon* told producer *George Martin* that the song should sound like it was being chanted by a thousand Tibetan monks, with his vocal evoking the Dalai Lama singing from a mountaintop.

Not 17,000, but only a thousand.

He settled for his vocal being hijacked into a Leslie speaker.


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## pianozach (May 21, 2018)

Tikoo Tuba said:


> https://ericwhitacre.com/the-virtual-choir
> 
> Individual recorded samples are collected . Each singer is alone in a studio . Sometimes a dog chimes in . Likely such samples are relegated to the distant background chorus . You may hear some chosen voices dominant and up front in the mix . I do . Yes , the chaos glitch must be there somewhere , a child wailing , a bird calling ... sublime .


A virtual choir.

Yeah, we did a few. With way less than 17,000. Not even a hundred.

The computer power, man hours, and pre-planning is massive. We kept overloading the CPU . . . while the software could *theoretically* handle many videos at once, it's limited by the ability of the CPU to keep up.

These massive virtual choirs require pre-mixing, pre-pre-mixing, pre-pre-pre-mixing, etc., sort of like having only a 64-track tape deck for a song . . . but you have a thousand over dubs, so you have to 'group' collections of tracks together and mix them. Or like recording a symphony orchestra with a mic on each orchestra member . . . you may make a pre-mix of the WWs, the brasses, etc., and you might mix each of the string sections seperately, then mix the string sections together.

Creating our virtual choirs taught me a great deal . . . there is, indeed, a great deal of 'chaos' involved in each individual audio/video track . . . . it can be visual . . . the singer is too close, too far away, there's a spinning fan over their head, there's a weird object on the bookcase, someone walks through the background, the light from the window changes as a cloud goes by. The singer might be framed too low, or looking a different direction. The backlighting might be too bright.

It can be audio . . . the air conditioner in the background, a plane or car going by, a dog barking. There might be audio distortion, a buzzing, a hum, crackles. And people sing quite differently sometimes when they're not surrounded by all the other singers.

It can be technical . . . the sample rate can vary . . . the video quality can be poor (poor resolution).

Here's one my wife and I did for the Chorus Awards ceremony. The middle section repeated well over a dozen times, and once we'd gotten all the video and audio mixed the choir director gave a listen and noticed that BOTH of the two basses were singing a wrong note in every repeat (they sang the tenor's major seventh rather than a root of the chord). Thank heaven that the software has pitch correction . . . I simply 'corrected' the pitch each time it came around.

Here . . . I compiled and mixed the audio, my wife created the video.

Look at the lighting, the backgrounds, the framing. One of the girls kept gradually slouching throughout, and we had to reframing constantly. 18 students.






And another with 24 people.


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## Tikoo Tuba (Oct 15, 2018)

Please explain the aesthetic of the virtual ? Yesterday I phoned my sister who is an experienced choir vocalist as to her opinion . She suggests virtual = compassionate . I am skeptical . I laugh .


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## pianozach (May 21, 2018)

Tikoo Tuba said:


> Please explain the aesthetic of the virtual ? Yesterday I phoned my sister who is an experienced choir vocalist as to her opinion . She suggests virtual = compassionate . I am skeptical . I laugh .


I don't understand the motivation for asking a question such as this. The 'aesthetic', as in the graphics?, the moving around of singer boxes?, the curvature of the choir?, the overall video aesthetics?

Or do you mean, instead, not the visual aesthetic, but the lure of a virtual choir in general?

While I don't feel I can give a decent answer to your question as presented, I can attest that singers need to sing. These days they cannot sing in groups, or for traditional live audiences. As an accompanist I know a great many singers, and they've been "sharing" their gift of singing online a lot lately. They're singing uplifting songs, inspiring songs.

Eric Whitacre's virtual choirs, which feature his special genre of atmospheric spaciousness, are large production numbers. Frankly, I don't know if we're truly hearing all the voices of the people appearing in his videos, but they're certainly impressive looking.

And if they give people joy or inspiration, that's great. If they instill a sense of wonder, or other emotions like sadness or joy, well, that's the magic of music.


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## Tikoo Tuba (Oct 15, 2018)

Thanks for the reply . Your explanation is virtually nicey nice .


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