Day: August 1, 2017

Looking At Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir Performing “Cloudburst” Live

Carl Setzer

I love Eric Whitacre’s work, as it speaks deeply to me. The soaring sopranos, amazing blends of voices, interweaving of tight-textured harmonies with breath-takingly open chords all delight me. His Virtual Choir pieces, though, achieve the highest levels of awesome. This one, Cloudburst (where gets bonus points from me by basing it upon an Octavio Paz poem) hits me strongly.

Inspired by a Midwestern thunderstorm, the song captures the audio essence of the storm. From a musical perspective, I adore his use of clapping and finger snapping to achieve the feel of heavy rain. And his interweaving of harmony and dissonance really strikes a chord (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun).

Regarding the “virtual choir” nature of this work, in addition to the choristers in the auditorium, there are an 30 choristers currently standing in 30 countries, all Skyped in.

And this pushes technical boundaries, too. VOIP communications suffer from lag issues, and I delighted at the way Eric dealt with that: the piece was written to use it. Turning a liability into an asset: genius.

So, please, enjoy Eric Whitacre’s virtual choir performing “Cloudburst” at a TED talk.

 

 

I’m experimenting with posts other than poetry. And this video delighted me so very much, I wanted to share it with you. I hope you like this post, as well as the music. Let me know what you think in the comments, or via a “like” or share. 

Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir Live “Cloudburst”

Carl Setzer

I love Eric Whitacre’s work. His music speaks deeply to me. His Virtual Choir pieces, though, achieves the highest levels of awesome.
This one, Cloudburst (where gets bonus points from me as he based on an Octavio Paz poem) is stunning. Inspired by a Midwestern thunderstorm, the song captures the audio essence of the storm. From a musical perspective, I adore his use of clapping and finger snapping to achieve the feel of heavy rain. And his interweaving of harmony and dissonance really strikes a chord (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun).

Regarding the virtual nature, in addition to the choirs in the auditorium we have 30 choristers in 30 countries, all Skyped in. Pushing the technical boundaries, too. I delighted at the way Eric dealt with the lag: the piece was written to use it. Turning a liability into an asset is genius.

So, please, enjoy Eric Whitacre’s virtual choir performing “Cloudburst” at a TED talk.

Keyboxes, Wild Goose Chases, and This Afternoon

Carl Setzer
Lavery - 15811 Three Lakes Road, Snohomish

In the Seattle area, we real estate agents use electronic keyboxes to access houses. Which means, when we list a home, someone needs to zip to the property and put one on. My team put a house on the market yesterday, and we really wanted to get the keybox on today. So, after getting copies of our keys, I head out. This home isn’t too far from my office, but with afternoon traffic, it took me over 1/2 hour to head out to Snohomish. Oh, a key (see what I did there?) element of this house: it’s new construction…and under construction. Now, per our schedule, the doors are on. And per reality, they’re not.

It was a true Laugh Out Loud moment to walk to the house, past the construction team with a keybox and look at the non-existent front door. So, I’ll be heading back…at some point in the near future.

Live and learn…live and learn.

 

Cakes and Heads

Carl Setzer

Head Cake, Katherine Dey on dionisopunk.com

A post shared by Dioniso Punk (@dionisopunk) on

 

French aristocrats
Their talk of “let them eat cake”
Then losing their heads

 

This is just a bit of an experiment to see how Instagram’s embed feature works. Looks like it’s too good, actually. Oh well.