Up and Over the Lockdown Barriers

Amies Overcoming the Obstacles of Lockdown and Zoom!

It is part of the joy of a choir that members meet together, sing together, breathe together and, research shows, their hearts beat together.

For members of the Amies Freedom Choir these are even more important than for most people. This choir is made up of female survivors of trafficking who are rebuilding their lives after finding freedom from  slavery. The choir also offers friendship, support, signposting to necessary services and is an important part of stabilising their mental health. 

Having just performed at the Women of The World Festival in London's SouthBank in early March, the choir was determined to keep meeting until the Lockdown restrictions were imposed. What to do? None of us had even attended a Zoom meeting, and certainly nobody had attempted to run a choir online. As with all activities within Pan Intercultural Arts, we decided to keep going any way we could. It was important to maintain the links, to help avoid loneliness and anxiety and to keep the music flowing.  

The first Zoom sessions were tentative. Time lags and poor connectivity plagued attempts to make a unified sound, and some people couldn't even reach us online. By singing one at a time the choir could cover material but as a new song emerged from the group they naturally wanted to sing it together.

We are not techno-wizards at Pan but we had heard that some online choirs were forming and we wanted to know more. The problem was that our choir members often had only one device for the internet at home, so they could not receive and listen on one device (eg a laptop) and record on another (eg a phone).  Was there a sort of karaoke software which could help us?  We couldn't  find it.

Well of course the people who should know are Youth Music so we sent off an email and after they had looked into it, we received two possible solutions. Thanks Youth Music.  We went for Voice Over - Record and Do More and trialled it. Yep it works.We could send the backing track and participants could listen to it through headphones and record their singing on the same device.

Not all the problems were over: We had to use emergency funds to get smartphones and/or data to some participants. We then went ahead and received back a lot of individual tracks.

Meshing them together is a bit fiddly but the video you can access here was possible. There are lots of voices singing together, or rather at the same time. Have a listen - is this a choir or is it lots of poeple singing to the same track.  We love it but we know there is still an element missing - the togetherness. That will return, soon we hope, but we are very happy to have achieved it and to offer it to you here - introduced by Choir Director Adwoa Dickson.

Enjoy

The Amies Freedom Choir was started with funding from Youth Music and is now joint funded by Arts Council England to allow some older survivors of trafficking (or those who cross the age limit) to take part. We also receive funding for our Alumnae Choir from The Maingot Trust.

photographs by Alecsandra Raluca Dragoi, courtesy of The Guardian