Virtual choir requires virtual worldwide collaboration

By Eric Anders • Apr 30th, 2010 • Category: Cloud Computing, COMMENTARY

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see” – Henry David Thoreau

About this time last year I wrote about a popular video that was produced by Playing for Change, a group whose mission statement proclaims the company shall "enrich lives by providing music of timeless appeal in innovative ways."

A friend had sent a note suggesting that I listen to their version of 'Stand by Me' as performed by a small group of extremely diverse but very talented individual musicians from around the world synchronized to a soulful melody sung by Santa Monica, California street musician Roger Ridley who's now deceased.

The piece, originally performed by the The Staple Singers in 1955, was part of the award-winning documentary, "Playing For Change: Peace Through Music". The link had already received a couple of million hits when I first put the headphones on and cranked up the sound. Today it's been enjoyed by over 19 million visitors around the world.

The song triggered such strong memories and emotions in me that I embedded the YouTube video in an article entitled 'Time Out'.

Several months later, a visitor on a military post in Pennsylvania must have shared the link because within days this site was besieged by hundreds of visitors from large and small Naval bases, Army forts, Marine outposts, and other government installations from around the globe.

I'm not sure if the interest was in the message conveyed in the music, or the spirit of artistic collaboration and cooperation experienced between the musicians and engineers to achieve such a remarkable multi-cultural result. Regardless of the reason, their creativity worked!

Vu ja de: See old things in new ways

If you're a frequent visitor to RELORoundtable, you probably already know I'm a big fan of TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) – a small but very popular twenty-year old nonprofit group devoted to the notion of freely – and openly – exchanging “ideas worth spreading".

Well, TED recently tickled my imagination with another interesting concept. A virtual choir – a variation on the theme used by Playing for Change. Take a listen.

Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir – 'Lux Aurumque'

Don't know about you, but personally it just boggles my mind that 185 individuals from 12 different countries who've never met or performed together can achieve this type of musical perfection simply from editing 243 uniquely recorded tracks of digital information.

In creativity ignorance is bliss, especially in the early stages of the ideation process. Involving ignorant people in an exercise ensures that they are not conditioned by the baggage of ‘knowledge’ and are able to see the same old things in new ways. A company would do well to hire novices to come up with creative ideas for problems. – K.R. Ravi

To me these types of 'virtual' meetings represent the enormous collaborative capabilities that the web holds for personal development, educational enrichment, medical and scientific breakthroughs, and the rapid growth of new business ideas and opportunities.

The more I discover about these types of creative technology infrastructures, the more interested I become in learning more about the new applications that can be developed for the moving and storage, relocation management, and global mobility service industries in 'the Cloud'.