Online Choir Fun

Are you trying to think up creative ways to keep your online choir engaged? Are you going around in circles thinking up new ideas for your social time?

Well, running a zoom choir, is a great opportunity!

Why?

You can screen share. Simples.

Here are my top 5 online websites that my choirs have enjoyed using, whilst we’ve been on zoom:

www.incredibox.com

Incredibox is an interactive musical site featuring animated cappella singers and beatboxers. By adding clothes, props and accessories to them, such as hats, sunglasses, snorkels, you can make them sing different looped riffs which cleverly layer up. You can solo and mute singers to give your arrangement a sense of form and you can download your creation.

create.kahoot.it

Used a lot in schools, Kahoot! is a great interactive quiz platform. Players watch the quiz on a screen and answer the questions using their own device, such as a tablet or a smart phone. Questions are timed and we love watching the numbers go up as everyone inputs there answers. Points are awarded by accuracy and speed. At the end of each question there is a leaderboard update, together with funny, encouraging comments about how good or bad you are performing.
Kahoot! Quizzes are just as easy to make and although there are many plans, you can easily use the free basic plan. We have found that even though the number limit says 10, we’ve been able to play with more than 10 people. Recently, I took my one of my kids to a drive in pantomime, and the pre-show entertainment was a Kahoot! displayed on the big screen with us answering from our cars on our phones. It was brilliant fun

www.highfidelity.com

High Fidelity creates online virtual audio social spaces for people to meet. Instead of being stick inside a zoom window, you members can roam freely around a virtual space and mingle. Whoever you face can hear you. However if someone is facing away from you, their voice level drops, simulating a ‘real’ social environment. With High Fidelity you can set up a demo session for free for up to 20 people. You can share a link in the chat and people enter via their browser. If you are also in a zoom session, they need to use headphones and mute themselves, otherwise there is an echo.

www.online-stopwatch.com

This thing I love about this website is that there are so many different types of timers and random name generators. My all time favourite is the duck race. I used the duck race recently to choose a name as the winner for a prize draw. You can name up to 100 ducks and you can set the race to last for as long as you want. I choose 2 minutes to build up the tension, because just like in real duck races, you never know who is going to come up from behind to snatch victory. Put some exciting music on in the background and it’s a really fun game which groups love.

musiclab.chromeexperiments.com

This is a magical site, perhaps more suits for children and teenagers. You have a selection of sound experiments you can explore, including Chord Maker, Spectrogram, Harmonics. I’ve tried the Voice Spinner with my choir by unmuting a singer and then watching the voice spinner respond with a sound wave. If you want your singers to make up their own music, they can use Song Maker – perhaps a good activity for breakout rooms, using a co-host to screen share to a small group who collaborate to create a song. The co-host can then download and play back to the rest of the group, when returned to the main session.

These are just a few of the available resources online which can be used to break up a zoom session and give your singers moments to not only be social but also to make music.

Have you joined The Creative Choir Leader Group yet for more ideas?