Whitney Houston is going to launch a concert tour. She will appear onstage with her original band and backup singers, including her brother Gary. The only catch is that Whitney, who died in 2012, will appear as a hologram
Welcome to Plain English, the best podcast for learning English through current events. I’m Jeff; JR is the producer; and this is episode 162. You can find a full transcript of today’s program at PlainEnglish.com/162.
On today’s program: Holograms are bringing some of your favorite artists back from the dead. How exactly does that work, and what is it like to see a hologram concert? That’s what we’ll explore today. Plus, we have a good phrasal verb for you, to turn something down. And it’s Monday, so we’ll close with a quote. Today’s quote is from Sir Edmund Hillary, the first explorer to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. So stay tuned for that.
Hologram concerts bring artists to life—sort of
You will soon be able to see Whitney Houston live in concert. The singer, who died at the age of 48 after an accidental drowning, will be revived in electronic form, according to Pat Houston, her sister-in-law and the president of the late singer’s estate.
During her lifetime, Whitney Houston had eleven number-one hits, including “Queen of the Night,” “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me),” “My Love Is Your Love,” and perhaps her most famous, “I Will Always Love You.” She was known for hitting and holding the high notes; she sang an excellent version of the national anthem at the Super Bowl in 1991; and she’s on the list of the best pop vocalists of all time. Toward the end of her career, though, her reputation was tarnished a bit, as she very publicly struggled with drug and alcohol abuse.
Ever since she died in 2012, all manner of companies have pitched her estate on business deals, but Pat Houston turned them all down. But that is about to change, and the estate wants to revive the singer’s reputation so that people can remember her in her prime. The estate recently sold a fifty-percent share in its assets to a music publisher that will rebuild Whitney Houston’s business. Together, they announced a new album of previously unreleased material, a potential Broadway show based on Whitney Houston’s life, and, most interestingly, the hologram tour.
A hologram is a laser light show that produces what looks like a three-dimensional image of a person on a stage. To make a hologram, you have to first start with a good image of the person in the right clothing, then match their typical movements, and essentially create a video of the person doing the actions you want him or her to do on the stage.
A hologram looks three-dimensional, but it’s just an image projected onto a screen. The screen is made of something called Mylar, which appears transparent—clear—when there’s nothing being projected onto it, but it reflects an image when something is being projected onto it. Here’s how it works in practice. There’s a projector on the ceiling of the auditorium or wherever the concert is being held. And it projects an image down onto a mirror on the floor of the stage at an angle. The mirror reflects it up from the floor onto the Mylar screen, and that is what you’re seeing when you watch a hologram concert.
This is hard to follow, so I’ll describe it one more time. The projector on the ceiling beams the light down at a 45-degree angle away from the audience and toward the floor of the stage. Okay, then the light from the projector hits the mirror flat on the floor of the stage, and reflects it back upward at a 45-degree angle, again away from the stage. That’s when the light hits the Mylar screen. The screen is tilted downward, so that it reflects the light straight back out toward the audience. From the seats, it looks like you’re looking at a vertical image.
If the physics are hard to follow, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is you’re seeing a lifelike image of a person walking around on stage, strumming a guitar, or belting out vocals. The person can walk out from the side, wave to the audience, sit down on a stool, pull out a guitar, sing some tunes, say good night, and walk off again. A good tour will have a live band that synchs up with the movements of the hologram, and of course vocals from the hologrammed artist’s career.
Holograms on stage are new. The most famous one was when the deceased artist Tupac Shakur appeared as a hologram on stage with Snoop Dogg, and they performed together. You can find that video on YouTube, but it is, as they say, “not safe for work.” The reviews of that one were mixed—it looked more like a cartoon. More recently, though, Base Hologram produced two tours: the singer Roy Orbison, who famously sang “Pretty Woman,” and the opera singer Maria Callas. They announced an Amy Winehouse tour, but postponed it in February, saying they were still trying to get the images and the creative work done right and that it was taking longer than expected.
Audiences have mixed reactions to hologram concerts. One reaction is, “Wow—it’s so lifelike, and a lot of fun to go to a concert that I’d otherwise never be able to go to.” The other one is—that’s creepy. Are you supposed to applaud? The singer can’t respond in any way to applause and will never know you gave it. I saw a video in which they interviewed people who had seen the hologram of the opera singer Maria Callas. One person was wondering, “is this art? Is this serious?” Others said she—should we call the image of Maria Callas “she” or “it”?—anyway, one person said the hologram performance was really powerful and seemed like Callas was really there.
One way this might be more convincing is a live hologram performance. I saw another video online in which a band took the stage in England and performed for a live audience in Florida. In that case, the producers didn’t have to rely on old footage or reproduce movements—the artists were living and doing the performance, just in another place. They could also see the audience on a screen in front of them, so they could interact with their fans. I think that would be a little more fun than watching someone who’s obviously dead give a concert. But that’s just me.
JR says he’s afraid of these holograms because they look like ghosts. Parece fantasma, he said. I think so, too.
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