Two Thousand People Singing Daisy Bell Together via Mech Turk

Bicycle Built for Two Thousand from Aaron on Vimeo.

Have you ever heard two thousand people sing and harmonize together? Bicycle Built For Two Thousand splices together over two thousand audio samples to sing the public domain song Daisy Bell, the song sung by HAL at the end of 2001. It is being launched today at ETech. You can watch a demo of the application above.

The crowdsourced song is made from 12 audio and 6 keyboard tracks. On the site you can listen to all of the tracks together, each one individually or the synth version of the song. Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey used Mechanical Turk to capture the samples. Each turker was played a single syllable or note from the synth version and asked to replicate it. People from 71 countries were each paid 6 cents to record their voice. The resulting audio samples were merged together and are now playable through the site.

This is the third Mechanical Turk art project that Aaron Koblin has created. The Sheep Market combined 10,000 sheep drawn by Turkers into a digital art app (Radar post). He also used the work of Turkers to create Ten Thousand Cents, a crowdsourced drawing of the US one-hundred dollar bill. Aaron, a Googler, also did the laser visualizations for the Radiohead video House of Cards.