Contemporary choral composer Eric Whitacre has recently been collaborating with singers from all over the world through online social media to create what he calls "Virtual Choirs." When I first heard about this a year or two ago I was skeptical that someone could take recorded voices from so many people's computers and mix them together effectively to create "real" choral music.
Today I found that he's done a couple of talks with TED, and from watching them I came to realize the real point I was missing is not that they are creating "good music" with this digital voice mosaics, but that they are bringing together people from all over the globe, dozens of countries, political "enemies," people who will never meet in real life, and creating something beautiful together that is about the music – about what Boethius called musica humana – the harmony of human life and society.
The sound is pretty cool, but the idea is brilliant and beautiful.
Listen and watch Whitacre's TED Talk from 2011 here.
http://on.ted.com/Whitacre
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