michael's musings on music: February 2013

In the past few years, a really cool Internet phenomena has developed. Its called the virtual choir or multitrack video, and the primary venue for these videos is Youtube. This is what it is:

Each part of a musical selection (choral, barbershop, quartet, really any vocal piece) is recorded separately with audio and video.
These videos are synced so that the audio from each part lines up with each other, therefore completing the harmonization.
The videos are edited with multiple picture in picture style, so that a small thumbnail of each part video can be simultaneously viewed while being played in the same area.

Multitrack music videos can be any of these styles of music:

Mainstream choral literature
Barbershop / Sweet Adeline choruses
Barbershop / Sweet Adeline quartets
Mixed ensembles
Popular music arranged for all men, all ladies, or mixed voices.
Any music arranged for any number of voices combined with real or 'beatboxed' vocal instruments. Some vocal performers can effectively imitate some instrument sounds, such as trumpet and certain kinds of drums with just their voice. Other performers utilize digital audio manipulation tools to produce 'voiced' wind instruments, whistles, synthesizers, and full drum sets.

Multitrack music videos can be done entirely by one person, or as many as 3000 voices with videos collaborated across the world. The possibilities are endless!

Multitrack music videos are often combined with some kind of special effect (i.e. green screen effect) or music video type of footage.

Multitrack music videos require audio recording hardware, audio editing software, video recording hardware (i.e. digital camera or webcam), and most importantly, non-linear video editing software. I will list some possibilities later on.

Successful Multitrack music videos can amass hundreds of thousands to millions of hits on Youtube. Why?

Vocal harmony just sounds good. The voice has been the primary means of making music for thousands of years. People identify with it.
The human voice is sensational as a musical instrument and deliverer of lyrics.
Because videos are of people singing, and singing is communicating with the face, eyes, mouth and body, people identify with the kind of message that vocal collaborators bring to music.
Probably the most important reason, is that most successful video multitracks are covers of songs that have already been made popular, and the video multitrack is appealing to an already large fan-base.

Here, I am going to compile a short list of successful musical multitrack videos. These are done by some quite talented folks out there. And there are many more multitracks.

Eric Whitacre, a brilliant modern choral composer, has compiled a series of Virtual Choirs. His virtual choirs are made up of a conducting track that he uploads to Youtube, along with synchronization instructions. Whoever wants to can view the video, and tape themself singing to his conducting track while listening for correct intonation and starting / stopping points through headphones. Those 'choir members' upload their singing videos to Youtube using the labeling format specified, where they are collected by Whitacre's team. The often low-quality audio is cleaned up and their videos are mixed on a grand 3-dimensional virtual stage.

Next, we move to some other choral renditions of Whitacre's works (as well as plenty of other music) by one young man that splits his voice into as many as 32 tracks, and unbelievably, sings every part from Bass to Soprano with perfect intonation and seemingly no amount of vocal strain. His name is Dan Wright, and these are only 3 of his many successful multitracks.

Next, we move to the realm of American Barbershop style music, and this is a huge field in the multitracking world. It consists of many many self-quartets and also some great virtual collaborations from barbershoppers across the world. One of the best artists in my opinion of this unique niche is, ironically Frenchman +Julien Neel

Christmas music is a great venue for multitrack collaboration, as evidenced by these tremendous videos.

Finally, American mainstream pop, Broadway, and Disney music covers, as well as some quite elaborate arrangements specifically for vocal multitracks. Disney songs have made a huge comeback as popular vocal multitracks. This man has the voice of a female and the voice of a male inside of his vocal instrument, and it is quite impressive. His name is Nick Pitera, and he has amassed millions of views.