Composer Makes Video Combining 5,900 Singers in One Song

Ever wonder what an entire city would sound like singing together in harmony? I'll tell you... it's breathtaking. This sent chills up my spine.

Grammy-winning composer Eric Whitacre received a great deal of attention on YouTube when he realized he could combine the voices of 250 singers, recorded individually, to make one awesome version of the piece, "Lux Arumque." Whitacre used social media to recruit the singers, sent them sheet music and then assembled the video to make it look as if he were conducting them while they sat in their respective houses. Whitacre is now conducting a similar experiment, but this time he has upped the number to a staggering 5,900 singers.

In "Fly to Paradise," Whitacre has combined 5,900 submissions to form a choir made up of sopranos, altos, tenors and basses. The video projects the faces of the volunteers onto virtual buildings to show just how massive this collective is. Besides the sheer number of volunteers, the demographics of the singers are also considerable: They consist of people from 101 countries, aged 6 to 98. Aside from the dozen people who helped Whitacre and what he calls a "small army of volunteers," the project was completed thanks to $122,000 in Kickstarter money. Though the song itself is only a couple of minutes long, the full video takes more than 13 minutes just to list every single member of the choir.

Whitacre wrote of his project, "We have truly become a global choir." The mind reels thinking about how big it could be next time.