The purpose of choir is to bring together a group of talented singers that will produce angelic music. Taking into account that a variety of voices that have to be placed in a room together and bond in order to create that type of music, it would be quite difficult to pull such a task off virtually and isolated. Currently, the choir team at CHS has moved all their performances online making the process even more challenging. As time passed by, choir director Dr. Wilson figured out a solution to produce their shows.

Students would begin with rehearsals as a group over Zoom and afterward, each student would practice their individual parts of the music. As rehearsals come to a finish, they are given the task to record videos on their own. Those videos consist of two sections: the audio of their singing voices and a lip sync video. From there on, the final stage to create their show is to send those videos to an editor.

The editing process goes something like this. Using a program, the audio is lined up consecutively on their own track so every student’s voices are in sync. Afterward, the lip-syncing videos will be muted and placed in the correct order to match the students’ voices. Once editing is complete, a link will be posted on the CHS choir website to buy tickets at any time for the pre-recorded show.

Considering online technology can become difficult to work with here and there, the choir president Nina Bashmakian shared the issues that often occur with these virtual shows.

“I guess technical issues submitting the videos, it can be hard.” Bashmakian said, “But luckily we have a cool editor now, and if we give him our videos ahead of time, he’ll have more time to edit it and make the videos look even cooler. So I think we just have to learn that along the way. Like our first concert, we didn’t have as much time to edit it so it was more on the basic side; it was still really good.”

Apart from the difficulties of an online setting, supporters are another factor that is necessary to keep the choir group running consistently. According to Bashmakian, tickets are around ten dollars per household, rather than per person. Although the number of sales have decreased, with a change in format of their shows, many supporters still show their appreciation even in light of the sudden change in the choir shows.

The choir team usually puts on their shows for a live audience, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have had to move everything onto a virtual platform. This has caused some issues because of the editing process, as well as trying to have everybody record their pieces separately. Although the sales have decreased because of COVID-19, there are still long-term supporters that purchase tickets for the choir’s pre-recorded shows.