'Water Night' , Watch a Choir Conductor Digitally Unite 3500 Singers from Around the World

'Water Night' , Watch a Choir Conductor Digitally Unite 3500 Singers from Around the World

HIGHLIGHT

For decades we've been hearing promises about how communication technology will one day eliminate distance itself, making everyone around the globe feel as if they might as well be in the same room.

(For decades we've been hearing promises about how communication technology will one day eliminate distance itself, making everyone around the globe feel as if they might as well be in the same room.)

Eric Whitacre introduces us to the Virtual Choir, and tells us how it came about and went on to be a YouTube phenomenon.

It begins with the real voices of 100-percent analog humans. 185 such humans, to be precise, based in twelve countries, and all of them visible on their separate screens as Whitacre plays the role of conductor on his own. The much larger-scale performance of "Water Night," a piece composed for the poetry of Octavio Paz, brings together 3,746 videos from 73 countries, necessitating a credits sequence longer than the piece itself.

But on the most basic level, even this new way of making music would be merely an expansion of the oldest way of making music: with one human voice, then another, and another.

Let's listen to the video and think about it once.