When Delete takes on a new project we constantly search for innovative ways to approach it.  This ensures we remain on the leading edge of web development, and our clients ahead of their competitors. Our latest project for Universal Music was an excellent opportunity to try something new and deliver a unique solution. View here

Acclaimed conductor and composer Eric Whitacre has recently begun his second Virtual Choir project, which aims to bring budding singers from around the world together via a dedicated YouTube channel in one combined choir. Participants are encouraged to record themselves singing a part of a specially created piece of music via their personal webcams. Early next year Eric and his team will combine these videos into an international virtual choir - in what will be a spectacular example of social networking and musical collaboration. 

The problem for Universal was that they had no destination for presenting the video submissions, and no way of illustrating the global perspective of this project. Working closely with them we set about creating a platform that solved this problem.

The solution encompassed three components: the YouTube videos, Google Earth and Eric's website CMS (Wordpress). The approach was to develop an application that pulls the videos directly from YouTube and places them on an instance of Google Earth for users to view. The simplest method for achieving this was to create a custom Wordpress plug-in that allows the administrator to search and import relevant videos, which are then automatically placed on Google Earth based on the contributor's location.

The result is a simple yet powerful combination of YouTube content and Google Earth that demonstrates how far the Virtual Choir project is reaching across the globe. We look forward to watching it grow. Maybe we'll even convince one of our team to belt their own version out someday soon...

The Virtual Choir Earth View

Get involved yourself