Hallelujah, a WITHIN Original in partnership with Lytro, is now available on WITHIN. Learn about its creators’ stories, production process, and inspiration below.
By: Zach Richter, Director
Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is an incredibly powerful song and one that means a lot to me. The song has been covered numerous times over the last 30+ years by a wide range of artists; we wanted to try to bring it to life in an entirely new way.
In January of 2016, Bobby Halvorson (composer/singer), Eames Kolar (producer) and myself started collaborating on this idea.
At the time, I had been listening to a lot of choral music and was trying to figure out a way to bring that into the VR space, but the whole idea really came to fruition when we saw some of Bobby’s test arrangements where he was singing all ranges of a song himself and editing them together.
The question became, how can we take what Bobby was doing vocally and turn that into an immersive experience?
After months of trial and error and re-composing the song more times than I care to remember, we found something we were all really happy with.
Our interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is centered around a unique five-part a cappella arrangement, which is composed and performed — both by Bobby — in-the-round, and captured in rich 3D sound.
Most VR is fantastical — people seek to do something out of this world. We looked at this project as an opportunity to do something extremely human — one that made sense for VR simply because, in real life, you can’t have five clones of the same person doing the same thing. We wanted to put viewers at the center of that “impossible” arrangement — so they can experience music in a new way.
For our “Hallelujah,” we partnered with Lytro, creating the first-ever public display of their volumetric VR technology. Viewers are placed inside a virtual world that feels and looks like our reality, and are able to physically move around within it. While most live-action VR systems keep the viewer fixed in a single point in space, Lytro’s technology breaks that boundary by giving the viewer freedom to move, allowing for a lifelike sense of presence that hasn’t been possible in virtual reality until now. The experience premiered in the U.S. at the Tribeca Film Festival, internationally at Cannes, and will be seen next at The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.
We were also able to create a stereoscopic pre-rendered version — available now on the WITHIN app — that immerses the viewer in incredible 3D sound, allowing anyone with a smartphone to explore the five parts of the a cappella and engage with this powerful music experience.
Our take on “Hallelujah” is grounded in church music — in humans singing. While mastering, we left the vocals almost untouched. Beyond the technical aspect, we became interested in medieval rhythm techniques like hocket: a choral approach that was used in 14th-century France, in which the melody is shared across different voices.
We wondered, how can church music be made to feel modern? “Hallelujah” has religious undertones for many people, and irreverent connotations for others; it’s a song that means so much, and so many different things, to so many people. Leonard Cohen said it’s not his song anymore — it took on a life of its own. “Hallelujah” absolutely took on new life for us; we can’t wait for you to experience it for yourself.
Watch the making-of video here:
Zach Richter is an award-winning director and creative director at WITHIN. His work combines interactive media, technology, and storytelling. In 2015, Richter directed the NYTimes first virtual reality film, “Walking New York” and more recently was a director/creative director on the WITHIN VR series “The Possible,” created with David Gelb.
