Grammy Winner Eric Whitacre Conducts First Ever Live Virtual Chorus Using Groundbreaking Tech

Grammy Award-winning conductor and composer Eric Whitacre, whose worldwide audiences for virtual choir performances number in the millions, will use groundbreaking technology from JackTrip Labs to create his first ever live virtual performance, conducting dozens of young chorus members singing in synch while hundreds of miles apart. Whitacre will offer a World Premiere SSA arrangement of "Sing Gently" performed by choristers from Ragazzi Boys Chorus, San Francisco Girls Chorus, and Southern California Children's Chorus singing together in real time.

Recorded live on JackTrip Virtual Studio, this free digital performance will be hosted by Eric Whitacre and streamed on his Facebook page (Facebook.com/EricWhitacreOfficial) 12pm PDT/3pm EDT/8pm BST, Friday, May 28, 2021, followed by a live Q&A with Whitacre and Mike Dickey, CEO of JackTrip Labs. After its virtual premiere, the work will remain available for online audiences on Facebook and other platforms. For information the public may visit ericwhitacre.com.

Whitacre is widely considered to be the pioneer of Virtual Choirs, creating a single stirring vocal work by splicing together individually recorded performances by dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of singers. Since 2010, his works have been viewed and shared around the world by millions of viewers. In a remarkable feat last year, he collected more than 17,572 singers from 129 countries to perform his musical composition "Sing Gently" - a deeply moving piece that has now garnered nearly two million views on YouTube. For this performance, for the first time Whitacre will be able to assemble virtual choristers to sing together in real time, performing a new arrangement of that uplifting work re-created for treble voices (First Soprano, Second Soprano, Alto). It is made possible by the JackTrip Virtual Studio technology that allows singers and musicians to hear each other and perform in unison from their homes via normal internet connections, providing in-depth interaction as if they were in the same room.

Grammy Award-winning composer and conductor Eric Whitacre is among today's most popular musicians. His works are programmed world-wide and his groundbreaking Virtual Choirs have united singers from more than 145 countries over the last decade. His compositions have been widely recorded and his debut album as a conductor on Universal, Light and Gold¸ went straight to the top of the charts, earning him a Grammy. As a guest conductor he has drawn capacity audiences to concerts with many of the world's leading orchestras and choirs, in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Royal Albert Hall, and Buckingham Palace. A graduate of Juilliard School of Music, Whitacre completed his second term as Artist in Residence with the Los Angeles Master Chorale in 2020, following five years as Composer in Residence at the University of Cambridge (UK).

In 2021, Eric was named a Yamaha Artist. His long-form work The Sacred Veil, a profound meditation on love, life and loss, was premiered by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, and released on Signum Records in 2020. His recent collaboration with Spitfire Audio resulted in a trail-blazing vocal sample library, became an instant best-seller and is used by composers the world-over. Later in 2021, Whitacre will launch the Virtual School with its first course: The Beautiful Mess: Lessons in Composition and Creativity. "When I created the first virtual choir video, I never anticipated the immense popularity," said Whitacre. "Musicians want to come together to create something beautiful, and now JackTrip Virtual Studio provides them the tool to do so, dissolving the technological barriers that kept them apart. This technology offers the future of music, allowing musicians a feeling closer to the ephemeral beauty to the electricity of performing live together in the same room."

JackTrip Labs was spun out as an independent public-benefit corporation from the JackTrip Foundation, a collaboration between Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) and Silicon Valley software entrepreneurs. JackTrip Virtual Studio, the online platform which allows users to play music together remotely over the internet, was initially developed in Silicon Valley during the Coronavirus pandemic as a platform for local choirs, who had discovered they were unable to sing together over the internet due to the inherent audio lag time in meeting spaces like Zoom (as anyone who has tried to sing "Happy Birthday" has experienced). Unlike other virtual rehearsal/performance solutions which serve only small groups, JackTrip Virtual Studio can be used simultaneously by groups of over 100 participants, and offers CD quality, lossless audio, while all other applications compress audio, significantly lowering the sound quality.

A beta version of JackTrip Virtual Studio is currently available free of cost-prototype plug-and-play devices are available for purchase and build it yourself plans are offered by the company, making it easy for new users to get started creating music together digitally. It has now expanded its reach to users in more than 50 geographic centers around the world, with universities, music teachers, professional musicians, theatre groups and more utilizing JackTrip not only to rehearse and perform online during the pandemic, but with plans to foster new future collaborations from across distances, augment in-person classes, and more. The company expects to be available in over a hundred regions by the end of 2022.

For more information about JackTrip Labs the public may visit JackTrip.org.

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