Re: <nettime> Eric Whitacre, Virtual Choir

[tbyfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

If you focus on the final 'product' this can seem transformative, but if 
you untangle the constituent practices it can also be seen as little 
more than a networked variation on traditional musical activities: open 
communal performances, studio-centered processes that rely on session 
musicians, sampling and sequencing, karaoke, even the precaritization of 
music. In opera, for example, the cost of bringing everyone together in 
a prominent venue can be so immense that performers prepare for months 
on their own then come together only for a few rehearsals before the 
live performances. If anything, what makes Whitacre's project seem 
'transformative' is the presence of an auteur-manager presenting 
something as entirely new — which itself isn't so new. A few years 
back, I think, I read something about the mounting frustration felt by 
the other three Talking Heads while Brian Eno worked with David Byrne to 
produce _Remain in Light_: Eno's fascination with sequencing samples 
made them feel more like studio musicians generating snippets than a 
band working together. My point isn't to judge Whitacre's work one way 
or the other, though. It's merely to note — as we've seen in so many 
other contexts — that TED talks and slapping '2.0' stickers on 
projects tends to blur all the myriad practices that came before it into 
a gauzy '1.0' that's both idealized and denigrated. And to generate 
demands for ever-lower levels of technical latency.

It's worth noting the Belgian audio pottery hoax in this context for the 
brilliant way it wove together of a half-dozen strands of 
techno-cultural fascination around the fetish of lost immediacy:

	https://duckduckgo.com/?q=belgian+pottery+audio+hoax&t=ffab&ia=web

Cheers,
Ted

On 29 May 2019, at 8:18, John Preston wrote:

> The YouTube algorithm gave me a TED talk by Eric Whitacre [1] sharing
> his work conducting 'virtual choirs' where people recorded their parts
> separately and uploaded them to YouTube. The individual performances
> were then rendered together to create the final 'performance'. The
> project is on-going [2].
>
> I thought this was a nice example of a work of a traditional medium
> being transformed through network technology. Particularly the
> asynchronous nature of the process is very different from how a
> physically co-located choir would operate, and the result is not a
> conventional performance but a recording (hence my previous quote
> marks).
>
> I'd like to see a live performance by such a physically distributed
> choir using low-latency technology.

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