More Learnings About Live Online Singing from Song Circle #5…and More!
The fifth monthly SingOnline.org Song Circle is in the books, and it was the best one yet! Some key things we’re learning about live online singing:
Unison songs with multiple harmonies work best. Songs like This Little Light of Mine, Heather Houston’s Tending the Spark, and Lisa G. Littlebird’s Spirit Found Us are so wonderful for everyone to sing together. Rounds and songs with interleaved rhythms are harder to keep in synch.
Distance from the Jamulus server matters. We switched to a different server, via Melomax, that is more centrally located for most circle members. Shorter distance = lower latency. The goal is always to get latency below 40-50 milliseconds, as the human brain does a great job of compensating for delays lower than that.*
Be careful with using non-standard external devices. Any wired headphone is likely to work fine. However, once you get into USB mics, audio interfaces, and headsets, Jamulus may or may not be friendly to them. You can see a list of known good devices to use with Jamulus here, although if a device is not on that list, it doesn’t mean it won’t work. Mac is much better than Windows for sound/music in general; on Windows, refreshing your ASIO4ALL driver may help when you’re having a problem.
In other news:
Lisa G. Littlebird’s and Melanie DeMore’s Winter 2021 Community Singing Playlist is only available for 4 more weeks; you can find it here. Lots of great new songs to listen to, learn, and sing together.
Glen Phillips (of Toad the Wet Sprocket, and an amazing solo artist) has been performing on Facebook Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays since the start of the pandemic, with a different nonprofit promoted for donations each time. (Last week he raised $$$ for 3 food banks in Texas.) Glen is a longtime community singing songleader, and it is not unusual for him to bring some of our most beloved community singing songs into his shows, such as We Shall Be Known by MaMuse and the songs of Laurence Cole. Check out the details of his shows here, and consider supporting him and his many causes. A true mensch!
Debbie Nargi-Brown, author of SingOnline.org’s unofficial theme song, Be Open, and so many more of our favorite community singing songs, has a free 30-minute Zoom sing Sundays at 5:00 Pacific.
The next SingOnline.org Song Circle is Sunday, March 21, 3:45-5:00 Pacific. Check it out here.
Keep singing, the world needs it,
Marv
* For you wonky types (I feel you!), here’s some quick latency math. Latency is the delay from the time the sound is made to the time your brain hears it. 1 millisecond of latency is roughly equivalent to someone singing in person with you from 1 foot away. So, 40 milliseconds of latency is similar to someone singing from 40 feet away. The way we solve this at SingOnline.org is to decrease latency in various ways (eg. by turning off WiFi and by not using Bluetooth earphones) and using high-speed Internet, where we’re dealing with the speed of light rather than the speed of sound.