Virtual Choir: Building A 21st Century Ensemble, Zachary Gates

Virtual Choir: Building A 21st Century Ensemble

Zachary Gates Hammarskjold Middle School, East Brunswick, NJ Zegates93@gmail.com

In a recent conversation with a fellow colleague, he asked me why it seems like choral education is always the slowest moving field in terms of integrating new technology into the classroom. I’ve heard the common choral critiques before: not enough literacy, always chewing gum, and “choral-ography” that all but drowns out the sound of the choir. In all honesty, this critique was a new one for me.

Is choral education behind the times relative to the rest of music education? I tried to think of my peers who would argue against that—the ones who video record assessments, teach units on GarageBand, and help kids stay in tune with the InTune app. Those people might disagree that we are behind. There is, however, a large population that believes all their classroom needs are risers, a piano, and a chalkboard. For many teachers, regardless of belief, this is all that they are provided.

It’s important to see that the quality of how we integrate technology in the classroom is more important than the quantity or frequency that integration is occurring. A good resource to self-assess the quality of tech integration is Ruben Puentedura’s “SAMR Model” (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition). While “substitution” and “augmentation” are common positive enhancements, if we want education to be transformative, we need to consider “modification” and “redefinition” as higher quality levels of tech integration that seek to transform learning itself.

With this in mind, how do you use technology to completely transform a choral classroom? How do you make it meaningful and fun for students? These were questions I asked, and questions someone had already answered.

In 2009, popular composer Eric Whitacre embarked on a mission to create and produce a “Virtual Choir” in which multiple videos of singers were virtually displayed and together performed Whitacre’s “Lux Aurumque.” This process invited singers with a webcam, headphones, and internet access, to record and upload videos of them singing with Whitacre conducting them. After this process, a team of people stitched together the 243 videos from 12 different countries to create quite a captivating video.

In September, 2016, with the help of a team of administrators, teachers, and with the generosity of the East Brunswick Education Foundation, we set out to make our own “Virtual Choir” for East Brunswick Public Schools.

There were quite a few things that inspired us to take on this challenge. First, our district has a 6-7 middle school, 8-9 junior high, and a 10-12 senior high school. While our choral curriculum is vertically aligned and articulated, enrollment is not. We found ourselves lacking a consistent, engaging, and shareable platform where students were able to sing with peers from around the district regardless of grade-level, enrollment history, or ability level. In short, we wanted to simultaneously build recruitment and community, while redefining the way tech is integrated into the classroom. To help achieve our goal of making a “Virtual Choir”, we were awarded a grant from the East Brunswick Education Foundation for four “iPad Pros” and four “Shure condenser microphones that would allow us to have multiple devices across our schools. These devices would either be able to play the conducting video that we made and students would sing along, or students would record their actual singing. In retrospect, we should have also asked for professional video-editing software and a website domain that would be free of the

“.weebly” -- a free website builder. Free tools were fine though, and we were able to get creative putting the videos together with iMovie.

We felt that it was important for the first “Virtual Choir” to be assigned a song that we knew would be successful. There is an arrangement of The Star Spangled Banner that we knew was easy, and that many students had already learned from singing at various award ceremonies, football games, and graduation.

Our website (ebpsvirtualchoir.weebly.com) was organized so that students could easily navigate and complete the three steps: Practice, Record, and Upload.

Practice

The practice page consisted of PDFs of the sheet music, as well as practice tracks where each part (SATB) could choose their corresponding track and hear their part in one side of their headphones, while the other voices played on the other side. These were the same tracks that would play during the conducting video.

Record

To ease the task of having to try and edit out extraneous noise and to avoid rejecting a video submission due to the audio having something that continuously distorted it, there were clear instructions throughout the whole process. The very first instruction was to try and get away from any loud ceiling fans, traffic, or zoos. This really helped us keep all the recordings that were submitted.

To sync up all of the videos and audio, we asked students to clap at a certain point before singing so that we could easily pinpoint where the singing started based off of the clap. Perhaps we should have asked them to clap twice like Eric Whitacre did because very often the clap was slightly late and only marginally helped syncing up the audio.

Submit

Having singers submit their video in a controlled and uniform way was highly imperative. Luckily, we were able to embed a link to a “Google Form “where students were able to attach a file. Only students, teachers, or administrators from our institution could attach a file (a restriction by Google), so alumni and community members had to send the video via email.

Production

At first, we were highly concerned with the quality of the “performance.” With only 9 singers added, the sound was very exposed, cold, and honestly unpleasant. With 163 more tracks to add, it wasn’t looking good either. But something strange and truly choral happened. As we added more and more voices, their sound supported each other, the tone warmed up, and what was once exposed was now sounding more balanced: a lot like an actual choir!

We added an appropriate amount of equalizing, compression, and reverb to the sound so that it would have a more professional sound. In addition, each voice part was grouped together in the software, so the volume of each voice part could be individually controlled without having to painstakingly edit dozens of tracks for one effect.

Unveiling

It was decided that the “Virtual Choir” should be debuted at the junior high school and senior high school concerts. Instead of just releasing the video on a digital platform, it meant a lot to be able to share it with the community who made it.

As usual, we invited our building and district level administrators to see the concerts, but for those who could not attend, we were able to send this quick video of students using technology to engage in the arts! All were able to see that the senior high school principal was prominently displayed crashing the cymbals after “land of the free”.

While I watched the videos of students singing together, I saw more than just videos of singing alone in bedrooms. I saw them perhaps singing for the first time ever at home. Perhaps that was the first time a family member heard them sing at home too! I wondered what effect that might have down the line when it comes to community support and perhaps little siblings wanting to join choir.

Custodial staff and security personnel who were in attendance really enjoyed the video as well. One security guard even went up to our supervisor exclaiming, “Wow! They are really good! How long did they rehearse together?” After explaining that they never practiced together once, they could not believe it, and to a degree neither could I. This was a project that our team had seen accomplished at a very professional level by a highly skilled and connected conductor and composer. Apart from that, there was no blueprint, guide, or “Virtual Choir for Dummies” to refer to. Instead, we had energized students, incredible administrators, and dedicated educators who were not afraid to try something new and go the extra mile. That extra mile made a huge difference for our program and for our students.

What’s next...

We’ll be continuing the “Virtual Choir” this year with a few modifications. First, we’ll be exploring a middle school and elementary “Virtual Choir”. A few changes will have to be made to the practice, record, and upload process, but with a fun, easy, and engaging song selection, and with extremely positive support from all corners of administration, it’ll be sure to make quite the impact in the musical community of East Brunswick.

To see the 2017 EBPS “Virtual Choir” and the website, go to ebpsvirtualchoir.weebly.com.