Part of the success of the Vancouver Orpheus Male Voice Choir is the wonderful rapport that the choir has with its audiences.
Much of this is due to the fact that the choir sings without music. Choir members must pay attention to the director, of course, but can also look at the audience. The audience can see the faces of the choir members without the distraction of a music folder in the way. Our motto is "for the Joy of Singing", and it shows!
However, all this memorization presents a steep learning curve, especially for new members. To join the choir and be presented with a two inch thick binder of sheet music is more than a bit daunting, especially if you don't read music!
In an effort to help out, we have devised an aid for everyone that is proving to be very useful. Choir members can hear their part emphasized but in context with the other parts while seeing the music on the screen.
We have been asked by people from other choirs for more information about this aid, and what you are reading now is an attempt to provide enough information so that you can do something similar for your choir if you wish. This page is deliberately designed with minimal styling so that the method is as clear as possible. Feel free to copy the contents of this page and adapt the ideas as you see fit.
First of all, an example song and then the technical details.
The Dursley version of "O Canada" is an example of the type of support we provide for our members. Clicking on one of the parts below the name of the song will play the song with that particular part emphasized over the others. (Please note that the first time you attempt to play this piece you will be asked to download a free plugin for your browser. The plugin is available for the Windows and Mac operating systems, is perfectly safe to install, and has been tested with the Opera, Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers. It is not available for Linux systems.)
We use the music notation program Sibelius for our choir, but the principle is the same for other music notation programs that have a web-based plugin.
Entering the music into Sibelius is the hardest part. If you have a pianist who can sight read the music, the simplest method is to enter the music using a midi keyboard. Very clean originals can be scanned in, but even with the best originals, expect lots of work to correct any errors.
There are other advantages to having the music in Sibelius. While all our music is purchased with proper respect to copyright laws, some of our copies are getting rather old and messy with lots of markings, highlighter emphasis etc. Having the music in Sibelius allows us to print clean copies if necessary.
It should be emphasized here that this is not a method for sharing music with other choirs. The Vancouver Orpheus Male Voice Choir respects copyright laws. All of our music is available to members only in a protected section of this website. (The above example, O Canada, is in the Public Domain.)
Sibelius also allows us to produce sound files in the .wav format with the necessary emphasis for each voice. This feature allows us to produce CD's and tapes for practice purposes.
Now is a good time to talk about file names. Developing a procedure for naming files and adhering to it will simplify things in the future. Here is the system that we use.
The "05" refers to the version number. Since we have a number of people working on our music collection, it becomes important to update the version number whenever a change is made. The Sibelius files are small and can easily be sent back and forth by email as changes are made. (.sib is the Sibelius file extension.)
Each of these files has the same piece of music in it, but the voice emphasis is different in each case as indicated by the filenames.
We use a piano sound for the emphasized voice to make it stand out against the other voices. The percussive nature of the piano sound makes it easier to hear the rhythm. Some computer sound cards and speakers do not do a good job of sound reproduction. This is especially true for laptop computers and Bass voices. The "Orpheus" is a male voice choir so our parts are TTBB. The Tenor parts are shifted to the right stereo channel and the Baritone and Bass parts to the left channel. The emphasized part is moved to the center. In other words, you hear your part as if you were standing in the choir with the other parts around you. (True for the standing arrangement we use at present.)
In practise, steps 2 and 3 are usually done at the same time.
Moving the files to your own website is just a straightforward file transfer. It is most easily done using an "ftp" program such as FileZilla which is freely available on the internet.
This only has to be done once. Sibelius gives you a sample file that can be edited to play a single .sib file. However, this is very cumbersome in practice.
We have developed a simple system using the PHP programming language so that only one file needs to be created to play any of the .sib files. Almost all websites now support the PHP language, and your system administrator or ISP can tell you whether or not PHP is available. The source code for this PHP file is included as a large comment block in this HTML file. Simply look at the source code for the file you are reading now, and you will see the PHP code near the end of it.
Look at the example above. Each song has its name in a header block. Below that, we have links to the various voice files. Exactly how we do that is detailed in the HTML source code for this page.
The appearance of titles etc for the Scorch plugin are governed by a Stylesheet called by the scorchplay.php file. The complete source code for this stylesheet is also included as a comment block near the end of the source code for the file you are now reading.
Although this may all appear to be rather daunting at first glance, the concepts are actually quite easy to implement. Anyone with experience in developing even simple websites should have little problem with this.
Good luck, and please let us know if any of this information is of use to you. If part of this web page is unclear, please let us know how we can make it better.
Happy Singing!