In October I was contacted by Ben Morris, Musical Director of the Chapter House Choir, about developing a virtual version of the renowned Carols by Candlelight concert that the choir perform every year. The pandemic has shut down hundreds of choirs across the country, and Ben was keen to find a way of allowing their regular Christmas concert to go ahead.
Our grand plan was to set the 'floating head' videos of self-recorded choir members against background footage filmed in the Chapter House at York Minster. Atmosphere was paramount - we wanted people watching to get a sense of what it felt like to be in the beautiful setting of the Chapter House. The wonderful choristers each recorded 5 pieces over the course of a few weeks (with some very elaborate home recording setups!) and background footage (and some location sound) was recorded by David Rose Sound, which gave me some great options for the visuals of the concert.
Once I'd edited and mixed the choir parts (and dealt with the various obstacles involved in using home recordings - paper rustles and weird processing anyone?!), I used an impulse response (IR) recorded by Lidia Álvarez-Morales (paper, dataset) to give a sense of being in the acoustics of the Chapter House. An impulse response captures the acoustic fingerprint of a building, so can accurately recreate the reverberation when applied to a sound. I used the IR measured for source position 1 and receiver position 2 (illustrated in Figure 1 in the paper), to give a sense of being in the front row of the concert.
On 16th December, the final concert premiered on both YouTube and Facebook. It seemed to go down incredibly well, with some lovely comments from all over the world. The combined view count across the two videos currently stands at over 25,000!!!
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