Creativity and the Big Picture for New Media

We need to get the big picture for learning and using new media and feel their potential for bringing out the best in people through creativity and collaboration. This was the theme of our third class in Digital Culture today (Recordings of all class periods can be found here or via the recordings tab above).

To this end, I showed some examples of collaborative creativity. First, Eric Whitacre's virtual choir:


This project from 2009-10 was remarkable due to its manner of creation. First, Whitaker put his musical scores up on his blog for anyone to download:

Then, he posted an accompaniment/conductor's track which included both musical coaching and technical instructions for doing the recording:

Volunteers learned parts on their own and then posted their tryout tracks on YouTube with an appropriate tag so they could be found by the choir organizers. Those organizers then screened and selected the tracks (some 288) and combined these into the virtual choir -- nicely synchronized via a beep on the conductor's track and the use of earphones among the participants who listened to the same accompaniment as they sang. In effect, the tryout tracks became the performance tracks, pulled together through digital magic (but not overly doctored in post production).

I mentioned that these individual singers' tracks could still be found online. Here are some example tracks to check out. You can, like I did, download these and remix them into your own version of the choir just to see that it truly does work (and even on a smaller scale of nine voices rather than hundreds).

• Soprano 1 (and solo) (SugarbabyLA - Melody Myers, Tennessee)
• Soprano 2 ("defyinggrafity319" - Lauren Hess, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania)
• Soprano 3 ("SugarbabyLA" - Melody Myers, Tennessee)
• Alto 1 ("xoclkox" - Courtney Lea, Iowa)
• Alto 2 ("natureconspires" - Carah A. Naseem, Massapequa Park, New York)
• Tenor 1 ("ceemonkey" - Christian Cosas, St. Louis, Missouri)
• Tenor 2 ("acappellaninja" - Nick Fox)
• Bass 1 ("dunte86" - Jamal Walker, Dallas, Texas)
• Bass 2 ("TicerikT" - Erik Davis, Fort Collins, Colorado)

When I remixed them (using Camtasia on my iMac), I have to say I was very surprised at how good the combined performance was (contrary to my expectations). How was it possible that these people who performed asynchronously and unknown to one another could somehow perform not just coherently but beautifully? Wow.

You'll note in the list above that the Soprano 1 and Soprano 2 parts are by the same young woman, Melody Myers (who ended up being one of the soloists). She was among several people (including Courtney Lea, the Alto 1 above) who submitted several parts and had more than one accepted in the final choir. That's trippy! Melody decided to take this project into her own hands and actually recorded every single track for the choir (even the men's parts) and she created her own version of the virtual choir singing all the parts herself. Pretty cool:

Not all of the participants are fine singers (Hear for yourself. Search "Eric Whitacre Virtual Choir Lux Aurumque" on YouTube and browse around among the many tracks that come up). But even those that sing well are usually performing in poor lighting, in their bedroom or the basement, wearing regular clothes and, well, not looking much like performers of uber-cool contemporary choir music. Here's a gallery of them to give you an idea of it. These aren't professionals; these are amateurs singing their hearts out to webcams, not caring if a stuffed rabbit pokes its head out from their closet (see it??). Even Melody, the star performer, apologizes on her video because her bird freaks out when she hits the high notes!

As I discussed this in class, this exemplifies new forms of creativity made possible in the digital age through collaboration and technology. This is creative crowdsourcing. And despite the amateurism of the individual efforts, the total effect is nothing short of stunning. It is a bit of a metaphor for the web at large, or at least it signals the human capability to fashion amazing new things by working both independently and together in the new media.

Furthering the theme of collaborative creativity, I showcased some music sung by my wife, Karen Mello Burton, from her blog (kazzysponderings.blogspot.com). She's gotten many friends to record songs with her, and it's been a delight to see how one person creating and sharing soon leads to others having the courage to do the same. It can be positively infectious. I had been toying around doing some kinetic typography using Adobe's After Effects program, and so I took one of my wife's songs and made my first attempt at it. Here, then, is the combination of our efforts:

Now, I know that wasn't the most amazing attempt at doing kinetic typography. I'd browsed many other examples and knew that. But people liked it, and it was fun combining my efforts with those of my wife. So, encouraged to improve, I drew upon creative commons-licensed content from Flickr and got permission from students and a photographer friend to use some of their images. I made this video based on a beautiful recording of Morten Lauridsen's compelling vocal piece, "O Magnum Mysterium" (about the birth of Christ):


My larger point from class today was not that we need to be musicians or enjoy digital musical creations or even that kinetic typography is cool; it was about the power of collaborative creativity and how inspiring this can be. I liked how one student put it in class today: We can have faith there are many others out there that are trying to do good and important things. Something like Whitacre's choir makes us renew our faith in the vitality and creativity of humanity. And like any of those amateurs, we can also become part of something bigger than us all -- even when doing something mundane like typing up a blog post.

To me, learning social media, mastering services like Google+ or Blogger or whatever comes next -- can be tedious. There's a learning curve, and then once you learn it you often find yourself in the desert waste of superficiality. When people ask me why I haven't read certain works of popular fiction, I often respond by saying that I need some convincing that reading that new stuff would be as meaningful as re-reading Moby Dick (my favorite novel). And so I can imagine well-meaning people challenging why we need to learn new media. There are so many good works of literature, music and art -- substantial things that have passed the test of time -- why should I waste my time on media that are so new, untried, and often annoying?

Well, there is a reason to master the new media. Many reasons, as I've discussed recently, including pure exploration. Today's class presented another: we are creatures who create, and (tied directly to my faith in God) is the faith that we have means at hand to be amazingly creative and it's part of our nature to be so.

Also, I see creativity as one of three core parts of digital literacy. Creativity is not just a kind of romantic feel-good thing; it is a necessary activity of mind and soul that brings order to the chaos of too much information. When we create, we can cut through the chaos and somehow be at our best, or approach our best. When we can create collaboratively, it's even more exhilarating; we feel even greater sense of purpose and meaning.

And so, when my students feel discouraged because they don't get how to put that widget on their blog, or how to share a link on Google+, or they wonder why they should bother with any of it, one of my answers is that as we learn to connect well we are prepared to create well. This can give us a sense of purpose and wholeness that makes up for so much of the fragmentation that digital culture is accused of.

What are works of creative collaboration that you have found? What kinds of works would you like to try to do? I showed one website, Kompoz, for doing online music collaborations. That's just one avenue. What are you interested in? How will you create, and with whom?