Composer and conductor Eric Whitacre has been making virtual choirs since 2010. Virtual choirs are user-generated: Singers record and upload videos, which are then synchronized and combined into a single performance.
“Back in 2009, a young woman uploaded a video to me. She didn’t know me. It was a fan video. And she was singing just the top line of a piece I had written. And I saw her video and I thought, you know, if you could just get 25 people like she was doing to upload their videos. And we would start them all at the same time. As long as they were singing in the same tempo and in the same key, it would have to make a choir—a virtual choir. So it started as a very simple experiment with a small number of people, and over the years it has just grown and grown and grown,” he said.
Ten years later, Whitacre said creating a virtual choir “seemed essential” during the pandemic.
“It wasn’t until lockdown began here in the states in early March that the team got together and we said, ‘If there was ever a time for a virtual choir, it was now.’ But before it was just this beautiful art piece that we were doing, bringing singers together from all over the world. But now this was the only way we had to get together and make music,” he said.
Whitacre filmed a video of himself conducting “Sing Gently,” a song that he said “just came to me” during the pandemic. Virtual Choir 6 was born after 17,572 people from 129 countries sent in videos of themselves performing "Sing Gently" at home.
“You’ve got people alone wherever they are in their rooms, but you can hear in the background crickets or ambulances. I remember early on, there was a young man who was filming a video and you could hear his mother off in the other room saying, ‘What’s going on in there?’ So all of that requires a lot of massaging from the technical aspect,” he said.
Putting together 17,572 videos and audio tracks has “inherent challenges,” Whitacre said.
“Essentially what we do is we put them into batches of 100 each. So with the sopranos, there’s nearly 7,000 sopranos. But if you take just 100 random sopranos tracks and put them into a ProTools session, you can see all 100. You mix those together, which actually doesn’t require that much mixing. Everybody’s singing pretty musically, and then that gets turned into one track, so now you just need 70 of those for the sopranos. And you get a much more manageable number that you can work with that way,” he said.
After all the videos were sent in, it took five weeks to edit Virtual Choir 6. It was completed at a “break-neck” speed, Whitacre said.
“The audio is relatively doable. It’s the video that they really worked hard on because again with the numbers of people that we’re talking about, some of those last scenes where you have thousands of people moving on screen, you deal with render time. So you might have only let’s say a four-second shot, but you have to hit render and then come back three days later after the shot has rendered and make sure that it all works,” Whitacre said.
“And one of the most extraordinary things that we’d never encountered, but because there was so many people, is when we were just finished and we were making final checks to make sure that everything had rendered correctly, the only way we could do it was to rent out a movie theater in London, and then the two executive producers sat with a notepad, and we had a screen big enough that you could see everyone on screen and say, ‘OK, there in shot 420, we’ve got something going on in the corner.’ It was nuts.”
Auditions were not required to join Virtual Choir 6.
“We have thousands of singers who have sung for the very first time in a choir in our virtual choir. And one of the beautiful things that you can have with voices that you can’t have with any other instrument is that as you mass them together, it kind of smooths out the rough edges. If people miss notes or are a little late on tempo—if you go to a football game and you hear 60,000 people singing together at the same [time], you know that not all 60,000 people are singing exactly together and exactly the right notes, but the massed voices actually creates something magical, smooths out the rough edges.”
Virtual Choir 6's editors figured out how small each singer's face would appear on screen.
“We had to do a calculation to see that even on a 4K screen, would you be able to actually get every singer’s face on screen? At some point you start running out of pixels. And 17,572 singers, which is where we landed, is pretty much the max. I think at the end of the day, you have 21 pixels per person for that final sequence where you see everybody," he said.
“Sing Gently” represents Whitacre's experiences at the beginning of the pandemic.
“I started to see that people all around me were separated, but more than just separated with masks, you could feel society sort of pulling apart, moving away from each other. And in my own little world, where I work with singers from all over the world, it was the oddest feeling to have suddenly our art form be a danger. You know singers are super spreaders. Just by singing, we endanger the people around us," Whitacre said.
And this was so surreal, something so benevolent and benign as singing could be a threat. And I had this idea that singing gently could be a metaphor for a way to live together during these times that it’s with compassion and with empathy, just be delicate and gentle with each other. And especially doing all of that together, singing gently as one. If we do all of that together, I think it then points a way forward through all of this.”
Even though Virtual Choir 6 was a salve for so many singers during the pandemic, Whitacre said there’s nothing like singing next to someone else.
“I know that I am like singers all over the globe which is that we just ache to be together making music in the same room. In a very simple way, just take the same breath together and make music. We long for that, we need that,” he said. “And the virtual choir—it’s a work around for now, and I find it a very beautiful expression of the human spirit, but it’s nothing compared to the feeling of just standing shoulder to shoulder with someone and singing something beautiful. That’s as good as it can get.”
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