The Final Exam

The Century Project closes in on the final exam

Finally, the big day comes. The final 100th anniversary concert looms large now on the horizon. How many men will attend? OMG, the attendance should be staggering. Men, wives, kids, girlfriends, friends, musicians, lovers of song.... The call has gone out. The Friday night concert is going to be the biggest audience I've ever sung for - Woolsey hall will be be packed to the gills! That's a couple thousand or more! Group after group will perform from through the years. At some point during the weekend, the full assembly of Whiffenpoof alumnae will regale the attendees with 15 or so songs - a chorus numbering maybe a couple hundred amazing voices!

The Big Unveiling

The 100th songbook is totally virtual and will be unveiled at this time. The 15 or so "Common Songs" from this book, the Songs of Yale and a few others classics will be "taught" to the surviving members over the next few weeks by a project whose scope is amazing and I want to talk about it. It's a story of an Internet project and a collaboration on a scale that boggles the mind. If it comes in on time, several hundred guys will be singing a bunch of new and old material together - guys from the last 50+ years of the Whiffenpoofs who have never sung together - all singing some songs they know and some songs they have never sung before.

I will touch on this process, but I suspect there will be other articles written describing it in more detail.

The Virtual Songbook

The 100 songs of the Virtual Songbook are at the core of the work. The project to produce this book spans a couple years with 4-5 men working to engrave 100 songs forming the top 100 songs of the group. There are many more songs that need remembering, but these 100 were chosen as the most momentous and representative of the group's history. Now that we're virtual, they are just the first 100 in the Virtual Songbook.

Then a few other songs are added from the Songs of Yale, from Marshall Bartholomew's other published work, and a song composed expressly for this anniversary.

The Big Collaboration - singing with the big boys from the last 50 years

The output from Finale was used to generate MIDI files that were sent to recording engineer wizard, Lisle Leete who was a Whiffenpoof in 1981 (and also an SOB, like me). He took these raw tracks, massaged tempi and fermati to make a pleasing and less mechanical performance, mapped the voices to pleasant instruments, and added a click track. These files were output to MP3 format as guide files for singers. Then, Whiffenpoofs of all ages were enlisted to take these guide files, sing along with them on home recording systems and produce WAV files using whatever recording software they had at hand, usually free software like Audacity.

The guys posted these individual track recordings, where they sounded a little like lost souls singing in a subway station, to a web site and the recording engineer collected them. He performed enhancements on the tracks - pitch correction, adding body, extending notes to eliminate ugly breaths, and made audio files of a virtual Whiffenpoof quartet/quintet/sextet that actually sounds like something. From there, he made what are called "part-predominant" tracks so each guy can listen to his part a little bit louder than the others, and learn the correct notes with the correct lyrics and a reasonably good tempo.

All this was done in a matter of months, and all by people who probably have never met one another. And now, hopefully they all will!

The Big Concert

When is the concert? Friday, October 2. New Haven, CT. Woolsey Hall. 7:30 pm or 8 pm or whenever they get it going on. It's going to roll on and on, so people will be allowed to come and go like some hippy festival.