We had the inaugural Zoom singing for Bay Area Sacred Harp this evening. Lena Strayhorn was the gracious host, and she followed Clarissa’s lead from the Seattle Zoom singing by asking people to say a little something about the tunes they chose.
Leigh did the screen sharing, and she came up with a couple of innovations that I liked. First, she shared audio only, so that while the recordings were being played you could still see all the other singers (though of course they were muted); it was nice to be able to see everyone else while we were singing to ourselves. Second, her husband Mark developed a Web app that allowed her to find recordings of the tunes online very quickly, which made everything run more smoothly.
I also enjoyed the people who chose to sing their own tunes. Of special note: the Kostka family had all four parts in their family, and led us in Rainbow; it was great fun to hear them singing for us live.
We had over 20 people on the call, so at the last moment I introduced another innovation: during our 15 minute socializing break, I randomly assigned people to breakout rooms with half a dozen others for about 10 minutes. That way, we could have actual conversations; otherwise, with 20+ people on a Zoom call, it would have been pretty chaotic.
I’m already looking forward to next month’s BASH singing.