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‘The Birth of the Virtual Choir’: Exploring the multimodal realisation of the Covid-19 liminal space in a YouTube virtual choir performance
Abstract
As countries around the world went into lockdown in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, people looked for virtual ways of reducing social isolation. Amongst these online interactions, a relatively new phenomenon – the virtual choir – grew in popularity. As part of a wider study on virtual choirs, this study analyses the multimodal performance of, and textual audience responses to, ‘The Birth of the Virtual Choir’, posted on YouTube in June 2020. The study uses a combination of Mediated Discourse Analysis (Norris and Jones, 2005) and the theoretical concept of liminality (Turner, 1974; van Gennep, 1960) as a means of understanding how one performance in this new genre was used to reflect personal crises during the pandemic and enforced lockdowns. It argues that the song mirrors a process of separation, transition and reaggregation in both time and space, consistent with rites of passages and liminal experiences, whereby social actors are isolated, use creative ways to find order to the chaos, then reintegrate into society as changed subjects. It also demonstrates how online creativity and illusion highlighted one choir’s experience on life and lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic, many of which appeared to ring true for their wider audience and other virtual choirs being born into the Covid era.
... Therefore, it is important for educators and schools to formulate a new model of art learning that takes into account the unique challenges and opportunities presented by digital technology. According to Kerry [16], virtual choirs tend to devalue social and artistic experiences because they heavily rely on digital production techniques that involve extensive editing. As a result, the virtual choir mainly relies on the simulated effect that results from digital editing, as opposed to the actual performance of a live choir. ...
The study aims to reveal the conducting techniques as a complex unified system. Its components are profoundly interconnected and have inherent functions, content and significance. The research methods chosen were a remote survey, assembly methods, analysis and comparison of the critical elements of the phenomenon called “the means of the conducting system in the 21st century”. The study has highlighted the importance of several modern principles of conducting. The study discovered a set of modern technical means of creating a performance: multimedia resources, software, modernised engineering equipment, and Internet communication tools. The dramaturgical plan of a piece of music is effectively implemented with their help, according to 81% of respondents. The crystallisation of the compositional structure based on modernised conducting tools is fully realised, as 85% of students say. The effect produced by the sound quality and a system of new gestures gazes, and articulation is best achieved, according to 89% of respondents. Prospects for further research in this area lie in the need to systematise modern conducting techniques when performing pieces of classical music and music of other styles, national schools, and eras.
"The relevance of the studied issue is the need to identify the main trends in choral performance, and determine the principles of the work of conductors and choral artists in the context of renewal of the components in this field. The aim of the research is to study the problem of current global trends in the development of choral performance as a complex multifaceted and integral phenomenon. Its practical methods (audio search; audio selection; audio analysis) were used in the research. The aspects of modern choral performance (interdisciplinary; socio-cultural; as well as artistic management; professional training; modern engineering technologies; information and communication space; technologies aimed at preserving human and professional resources) were identified. The current components of activity in the field of modern choral art were established. The directions of modern choral practice were identified (activation of the musical group in the life of society; expansion of traditional executive functions; growth of the genre stylistic palette of the choral repertoire). The system of key modernized methods of interpreting choral works of the 20th and 21st centuries was studied (principles of intonation; the principle of expanding the range; the principle of enriching the technical means of interpretation; the principles of forming the performance texture; the principle of interpreting the verbal text in the context of the choral score; the principle of creating different types of sound). The general features of modern choral performance in Ukraine and in the world were studied. The results can be applied in the process of researching future choral performing practice and preparing the relevant studies. The prospects of research in this field of musical culture are to enrich the theoretical and practical sectors of choral art as a complex system which is open for updates. Keywords: choral art, choir, choral work, performance interpretation, choral genre, choral style, timbre dramaturgy, performance analysis."
The relevance of the article. The relevance of the research topic is determined by the extraordinary popularity of the remote form of joint choral performance in contemporary musical culture. The virtual choir is a fairly new, but already very widespread form of music-making, which is gradually acquiring new characteristics and functions compared to those that were inherent in its early days.
The main factors of the development of the virtual choir phenomenon can be divided into “evolutionary” (the digitalization of art; the interest of performers in new forms of music making; active development of art therapy and inclusive art practices) and “revolutionary” (the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian-Ukrainian war, which, although more localized than the pandemic, involves a very large number of choirs that have been unable to work as usual).
The latter two factors have led to a quantitative explosion of virtual projects, as well as significant changes in their focus, structure, functions, and composition of performers, etc. that require appropriate scientific understanding.
The purpose of the research is to analyze and systematize existing studies of the virtual choir and to make up a strategy for its comprehensive research.
The methodology. The study of the available scientific literature on the phenomenon of the virtual choir was carried out using the tools of systematic, textual comparative and comprehensive analysis.
The results. The main scientific works on the virtual choir are systematized in four main areas: socio-psychological, technical, didactic and historical. It was found that musicology, choral studies and interpretation aspects have been studied very briefly. Most of the works reveal certain inaccuracies in the presentation of the history of virtual choral performance (except for Сayari), as well as some contradictions in the results of previous studies. In addition, the article raises the question of the conformity of the studied phenomenon with the concept of “virtual choir”.
The scientific novelty. For the first time, the research provides a systematic review of scientific papers about the virtual choir, revealing the current trend towards the study of non-musical aspects.
The practical significance. The materials of the article can be used in practical activities of conductors and choristers, as well as in the educational process of training conductors, choirmasters and vocalists in conditions of remote work.
Conclusions. Scientific comprehension of the phenomenon of the virtual choir is active, but rather limited. Most often, it acts as a certain aesthetic phenomenon that should replace (mostly temporarily) the work of “live” choirs during social cataclysms that limit the possibility of creative communication between people. That is why the most relevant areas of research are socio-psychological and technical. At the same time, many works raise the question of the legality of using the term “virtual choir” for this multimedia activity, which, according to experts, has little in common with both the choir and virtuality. As a matter of fact, the lack of musicological, choral, interpretological investigations, typical for traditional choral activity, revealed within the scope of this study indirectly confirms this idea. The first step on the way to further scientific development of this topic should be a multi-faceted analysis of the current activity of virtual choirs.
Social distancing rules during the COVID-19 pandemic changed social interaction for many and increased the risk of loneliness in the general population. Social media use has been ambiguously related to loneliness, and associations may differ by age. The study aimed to examine loneliness and its association with social media use within different age groups during the COVID-19 pandemic. A cross-sectional online survey was conducted in Norway, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia during April/May 2020, and 3,810 participants aged 18 years or above were recruited. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine associations between social media use and social and emotional loneliness within separate age groups. Emotional loneliness was higher among young adults and among those who used social media several times daily. Adjusting by sociodemographic variables, using more types of social media was associated with lower social loneliness among the oldest participants, and with higher emotional loneliness among the youngest participants. Among middle-aged participants, using social media more frequently was associated with lower social loneliness. We found that the associations between social media use and loneliness varied by age. Older people’s engagement on social media may be a resource to reduce loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic. We observed higher levels of loneliness among high-frequent social media users of younger age.
In the absence of clear, consistent guidelines about the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, many people use social media to learn about the virus, public health directives, vaccine distribution, and other health information. As people individually sift through a flood of information online, they collectively curate a small set of accounts, known as crowdsourced elites, that receive disproportionate attention for their COVID-19 content. However, these elites are not all created equal: not all accounts have received the same attention during the pandemic, and various demographic and ideological groups have crowdsourced their own elites. Using a mixed-methods approach with a panel of Twitter users in the United States over the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, we identify COVID-19 crowdsourced elites. We distinguish sustained amplification from episodic amplification and demonstrate that crowdsourced elites vary across demographics with respect to race, geography, and political alignment. Specifically, we show that different subpopulations preferentially amplify elites that are demographically similar to them, and that they crowdsource different types of elite accounts, such as journalists, elected officials, and medical professionals, in different proportions. In light of this variation, we discuss the potential for using the disproportionate online voice of crowdsourced COVID-19 elites to equitably promote public health information and mitigate misinformation across networked publics.
The current pandemic and the measures taken to address it, on a global scale, are unprecedented. Times of crisis call for creative solutions, and these are not reduced to the work of scientists or politicians. In everyday life, both in online and offline spaces, people use their creativity to make sense of the current situation, to cope with it, and to learn its lessons. Social media is a privileged space for mundane and participative creativity through the production and sharing of coronavirus Internet memes. In this article, we examine the creativity of such memes from a dedicated Reddit community. We ask, in particular, what makes a coronavirus meme creative and what this creativity tells us about the pandemic and popular understandings of it. To answer these questions, we use a triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods by having 480 memes coded by three social media users for surprise, meaningfulness, elaboration, humor, and creativity and qualitatively analyzing those memes that score highly on each dimension. An interesting finding concerns the importance of elaboration and humor for the evaluation of creativity in the case of memes, above the more traditional criteria of surprise (proxy for novelty) and meaningfulness (proxy for appropriateness), perhaps a feature unique for Internet spaces. The article ends with reflections on what these findings tell us about creativity on social media more generally and the creative processes involved in the generation and reception of coronavirus memes in particular.
Social media, and especially popular youth-focused platforms like TikTok, can offer a valuable window into youth experiences, including their perceptions of online learning. Building on a large-scale thematic analysis of 1,930 TikTok videos posted in March-June 2020, this study examines how young people shared their experiences of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings indicate that youth portrayed online coursework as overwhelming and relentless against the traumatic background of the pandemic. They sought support, empathy, and authenticity from teachers, and both received and provided emotional and educational support to peers on the platform. Students’ home contexts emerged as particularly salient, making visible the intersections between young people’s home, school and social lives. By facilitating a grounded, bottom-up understanding of students’ experiences and perceptions—shared in their preferred spaces and modes of expression—this research stresses the need to attend to youth perspectives to craft more equitable and empowering educational futures.
The Covid-19 induced United Kingdom-wide lockdown in 2020 saw choirs face a unique situation of trying to continue without being able to meet in-person. Live networked simultaneous music-making for large groups of singers is not possible, so other “virtual choir” activities were explored. A cross sectional online survey of 3948 choir members and facilitators from across the United Kingdom was conducted, with qualitative analysis of open text questions, to investigate which virtual choir solutions have been employed, how choir members and facilitators experience these in comparison to an “in-person” choir, and whether the limitations and opportunities of virtual choir solutions shed light on the value of the experience of group singing as a whole. Three virtual choir models were employed: Multi-track, whereby individuals record a solo which is mixed into a choral soundtrack; Live streamed, where individuals take part in sessions streamed live over social media; Live tele-conferencing, for spoken interaction and/or singing using tele-conferencing software. Six themes were identified in the open text responses: Participation Practicalities, encompassing reactions to logistics of virtual models; Choir Continuity, reflecting the responsibility felt to maintain choir activities somehow; Wellbeing, with lockdown highlighting to many the importance of in-person choirs to their sense of wellbeing; Social Aspects, reflecting a sense of community and social identity; Musical Elements, whereby the value of musical experience shifted with the virtual models; Co-creation through Singing, with an overwhelming sense of loss of the embodied experience of singing together in real-time, which is unattainable from existing virtual choir models. The experiences, activities and reflections of choir singers during lockdown present a unique perspective to understand what makes group singing a meaningful experience for many. Co-creation through Singing needs further investigation to understand the impact of its absence on virtual choirs being able re-create the benefits of in-person choirs.
This article advances a narrative approach to internet memes conceptualized as partial stories that reflect, capture, and contribute to wider storylines. One key difficulty in studying memes as stories rests in the fact that narrative analysis often focuses on plot at the expense of roles and characters. Building on narrative psychology and, in particular, transactional and linguistic types of analysis, we propose a typology of character roles—Persecutor, Victim, Hero, and Fool—that is useful to uncover scenarios within memes and, thus, reveal their intrinsic narrative structure. We apply this framework to the analysis of political narratives embedded within 241 coronavirus memes systematically sampled from Reddit’s r/CoronavirusMemes between January and May 2020. Five main scenarios or storylines emerged from this analysis, the first four depicting a more or less common narrative of protest against the incompetence and/or malevolence of the political class—from Donald Trump and the Republicans in the United States to Boris Johnson and the Conservatives in the United Kingdom and, finally, to politicians in Asia such as Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un—while the fifth scenario brought to the fore social categories made salient by the pandemic and focused especially on the relation between people who respect and don’t respect measures. The psychological, social, and political implications of these scenarios in relation to the pandemic are discussed, as well as the broader consequences of studying memes as narrative structures.
covid -19 has changed the way we sing in choirs and has seen the extraordinary uptake of Zoom as a video chat platform across society. This is a reflective tale of four choirs members and their insights into how they improvised with traditional choir singing in a Zoom space. It consideres how zoom pedagogies allowed them to bridge social isolation during the pandemic. It includes the voices of the conductor; music teacher/technician; the voice of a media savvy artist choir member and finally the voice of a singing visual educator. The article embeds Deleuzoguattarian thinking. It draws on the concepts of the machinic assemblage and becoming as choir participants who embraced Zoom to facilitate song. Singing in a zoom virtual choir brings forth a burgeoning new relational way of being. To find ways to sing and imagine life and self without physical, temporal and spatial borders.
This study investigates the implementation of virtual choir recordings in a choir class during distance learning. In this particular study, a virtual choir is defined to be a computer-generated sound recording that emulates a realistic choir sound. Students (n=21) practiced their parts using virtual choir recordings for a period of eight weeks; each student received a recording that excluded his/her own part but included the rest of the parts. After eight weeks of progressive study, students recorded their own voices on top of the virtual choir recordings and submitted them as final projects. Student opinions regarding the virtual choir recordings were obtained through a 12-question survey. In addition, two experts evaluated the final submissions turned in by the students. The data suggests that virtual choir recordings can be helpful to students with efficiency of practice and can provide a suitable audio environment to foster conscious-listening, accurate intonation and perception of pacing. Improvements are suggested to make the virtual choir recordings also more encouraging of musicality, highlighting its future potential not only as a reliable distance education tool, but also as a supplementary device for real-life choir classes, when in-person learning resumes. Keywords: music education, distance learning, choir, virtual choir, music technology
This manifesto stems from a transmedia initiative for collective research designed to shape-from the bottom-up-a socially responsive and responsible culture of inquiry, in observing, recording, sharing and reflecting on the changes to communication and interaction caused by the COVID-19 crisis and their enduring effects post-pandemic. The objectives of the manifesto are (a) to identify key changes in communication and interaction practices during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, and (b) to offer a blueprint for an innovative methodology involving academics and non-academics in collective research into these and any future changes to the communication landscape across different socio-cultural contexts. The manifesto presents: (1) the factors that make changes in communication and interaction during the COVID-19 pandemic topical for research; (2) the coordinates of these changes; (3) questions that these changes raise; (4) a proposal for a methodology that complements established research methods to understand these changes; and (5) preliminary data on the activities that the research collective PanMeMic has conducted in its first two months of existence.
This textbook provides the first foundational introduction to the practice of analysing multimodality, covering the full breadth of media and situations in which multimodality needs to be a concern. Readers learn via use cases how to approach any multimodal situation and to derive their own specifically tailored sets of methods for conducting and evaluating analyses. Extensive references and critical discussion of existing approaches from many disciplines and in each of the multimodal domains addressed are provided. The authors adopt a problem-oriented perspective throughout, showing how an appropriate foundation for understanding multimodality as a phenomenon can be used to derive strong methodological guidance for analysis as well as supporting the adoption and combination of appropriate theoretical tools. Theoretical positions found in the literature are consequently always related back to the purposes of analysis rather than being promoted as valuable in their own right. By these means the book establishes the necessary theoretical foundations to engage productively with today’s increasingly complex combinations of multimodal artefacts and performances of all kinds.
The network awareness tool (NAT) is a Web 2.0 based tool that enables professionals to become aware of existing networked learning relationships (within or between organizations), that can help them with real, urgent, work-related problems that are part of their daily practice. In most cases such problems arise unplanned, ad hoc and are usually dealt with informally. However these problems serve as a kind of 'social hub' that brings together professionals in order to develop a solution that allows them to continue working (De Laat 2012). These everyday work-related problems provide not only an opportunity for professionals to seek each others' help, and build meaningful networks, they are also a catalyst for informal learning. Informal learning tends to deal with implicit knowledge, embedded in day-to-day practice, and is a result of spontaneous learning activities (Billett 2001, Davenport and Prusak 2000, Eraut 2000, Marsick 2001, Boud and Hager 2012, Hargreaves and Fullan 2012). While observable, explicit knowledge is relatively easy to obtain, through reading, or training courses, informal learning in the workplace allows for the acquisition of deeper, tacit components of knowledge (Lane and Lubatkin 1998). Networked learning is a perspective that aims to understand learning processes by focusing on how people develop and maintain a 'web' of social relations, used for their learning and professional development (De Laat 2012, Goodyear et al. 2004, Haythornthwaite and De Laat 2012, Steeples and Jones 2002). In the context of this chapter, we define networked learning as a form of informal learning situated in practice, where people rely strongly on
From emails relating to adoption over the Internet to discussions in the airline cockpit, the spoken or written texts we produce can have significant social consequences. The area of mediated discourse analysis considers the actions individuals take with texts – and the consequences of those actions.
Discourse in Action brings together leading scholars from around the world in the area of mediated discourse analysis and reveals ways in which its theory and methodology can be used in research into contemporary social situations. Each chapter explores real situations and draws on real data to show how the analysis of concrete social actions broadens our understanding of discourse. Taken together, the chapters provide a comprehensive overview to the field and offer a range of current studies that address some of the most important questions facing students and researchers in linguistics, education, communication studies and other fields.
More than just humorous online content, memes fulfill significant affective, sociocultural and political functions at both the individual and collective level. By analysing personally significant COVID-19 memes within their larger vernacular communication contexts, this autoethnographic visual essay illuminates these digital artefacts as vibrant relational resources that facilitate sense-making and social connection in uncertain times. Examining these dynamics at different levels of inquiry (micro, meso and macro) and across various contexts (personal, professional, and mixes thereof), this essay therefore illustrates how, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, these memetic articulations – and the conversations they engendered – helped this researcher look within, relate, and ultimately pull through.
What, at first glance, could be less close, less akin than drama and reflection? Drama demands a stage, actors, a heightened atmosphere, spectators, the smell of the crowd, the roar of the greasepaint. Reflection is at least one of the things one does with one's solitude. But to counter this opposition an anthropologist tends to think in terms not of solitary but of plural reflection, or, much better, plural reflexivity, the ways in which a group or community seeks to portray, understand, and then act on itself. Essentially, public reflexivity takes the form of a performance. The languages through which a group communicates itself to itself are not, of course, confined to talking codes: they include gestures, music, dancing, graphic representation, painting, sculpture, and the fashioning of symbolic objects. They aredramatic, that is literally "doing" codes. Public reflexivity is also concerned with what I have called "liminality." This term, literally "being-on-a-threshold," means a state or process which is betwixt-and-between the normal, daytoday cultural and social states and processes of getting and spending, preserving law and order, and registering structural status. Since liminal time is not controlled by the clock it is a time of enchantment when anything might, even should, happen. Another way of putting it would be to say that the liminal in socio-cultural process is similar to the subjunctive mood in verbs - just as mundane socioReproduced by permission of the author and of the publisher from Performance in postmodern culture (Madison, Wisconsin: Coda Press, Inc., 1977,. The section heads (except for the last) have been added by the editor.
This paper argues that, contrary to what many musicologists and classical musicians have maintained, music can, and should, be analysed as discourse. It then surveys a number of approaches to the critical analysis of musical discourse and applies these approaches to a range of examples, including sonatas, advertising jingles and news signature tunes.
Nexus analysis takes human action rather than language or culture as its unit of analysis. We take one specific case to illustrate the methodology as well as its continuity with the project of Hymes, and of Boas before him, to take action against racism. A nexus analysis takes the constitution of human social groups and languages as a problem to be examined, shifting the focus away from groups toward action as the prime unit of analysis. This shift disrupts power relations between ethnographer as participant and observer and those observed who are now participants and observers in partnership, with consequences concerning when, where, and with whom ethnography can be done, consequences for the security of subjects as well as national security. We begin where inequality is perceived and analyze the actions that bring that about, our analysis itself being a form of action.
This book explores what speech, music and other sounds have in common. It gives a detailed description of the way perspective, rhythm, textual quality and other aspects of sound are used to communicate emotion and meaning. It draws on a wealth of examples from radio (disk jockey and newsreading speech, radio plays, advertising jingles, news signature tunes), film soundtracks (The Piano, The X-files, Disney animation films), music ranging from medieval plain chant to drum 'n' bass and everyday soundscapes.
Eric Whitacre’s virtual choir
- E Whitacre