The Love of God (Virtual Virtual Choir #1)

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The Love of God
Words and Music by: Frederick M. Lehman
Arrangement © 2025 by David Wesley

For my first major post-retirement project, allow me to present the fully realized Virtual Virtual Choir! I've spent a couple of years researching and and experimenting with AI and discovering the roles it can play in creative pursuits. I learned the Python language and all the nitty gritty details of training and running AI models on my own computer. I followed and tested new open source technologies as they were released, hoping that I would one day be able to bring a fully AI-generated virtual choir to life.

This presentation of "The Love of God" is mostly a proof-of-concept. The arrangement was written in just over a day. The sound and visuals were created entirely on my own computer, with nearly all open source / free technology. No new recordings were made in the process. I could not find a quality AI beatbox solution, so I cut and pasted sounds from my own previous recordings.

The sound of the choir resembles the real David Wesley Virtual Choir, as I trained an AI model using sub-mixes from previous projects (i.e. large male/female groups, not individual voices). The arrangement deliberately pushed the limits of my AI models, actually stepping beyond the male and female vocal ranges of previous choir projects. The audio quality suffers at these extremes, but the lessons learned are invaluable.

The visual appearances of the choir performers (with three exceptions) are completely AI-generated, in a multi-step process aimed at emulating the diversity of my real choir. They each have names, and the separate AI animation process imbued each with unique personalities. There are quirks and glitches in each performance, and you may see where each has been spliced together from four 1-minute parts. Even two minutes was more than my computer's GPU memory could handle. Each video performance took over five hours to generate locally. I tested a cloud computing solution that was 5x faster, but the cost per performance would be about $5 USD, or $140 in total, not including any mistakes!

From start to finish, this project took 6 weeks, but involved none of the 16-hour editing days typical of past virtual choir projects. Instead, I was able to squeeze the work into the short stints of free time I had available. I even had a week-long worship leader residency in the middle of all this! But truly, this project represents at least two years of dreaming, researching, and tinkering.

I hope you enjoy the message of this hymn, even if it is delivered in such an unconventional way!

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