Part front matter for Part I Media and the Imagination of Community

While the use of audiovisual and broadcast media to facilitate participatory singing has a long history, it might have been considered a fringe topic before the COVID-19 pandemic. When this volume was contracted, there was no plan to address media beyond a chapter or two. The fact that discussions of mediation now appear not only in this section but throughout the volume attests to the widespread significance of mediated participatory practices. Furthermore, these practices promise to outlive the pandemic-driven surge in their development. The pandemic has simultaneously shed light on the significance of mediation and increased its use in nearly all participatory contexts.

Whether pursued in public or private spaces, mediated community singing has served primarily as a leisure activity, and mediation has typically been associated with popular entertainment, such as karaoke or sing-along films for children. I have previously considered mediated community singing in the context of US movie theaters (both the “illustrated songs” of the Nickelodeon era and the lantern slides and films used in the 1920s and 1930s) and US radio and television broadcasts (Morgan-Ellis 2018, 2022, 2023). Malcolm Cook has explored these mediated singalong practices in Britain in earlier work (Cook 2012) and incorporates US and Australian examples into his chapter, “Selling with Singalongs: Community Singing as Advertising in Cinema, Radio and Television.” All such media were fundamentally commercial; publishing companies supplied complimentary slides to plug their own songs, short films promoted upcoming live appearances by performing artists, and radio programs served the interests of their sponsors. Mediated community singing has not typically served explicit ideological ends, and the individuals it engages often constitute a loose and transient community, perhaps sharing only an interest in mainstream entertainment. While scholars have explicated the cultural significance of these practices (see, for example, Abel 2001 on Americanization and illustrated songs and Sammond 2015 on blackface in sing-along cartoons), they have nonetheless remained peripheral—curiosities of more interest to collectors than professional historians.

In recent decades, audiovisual media have been utilized increasingly to facilitate traditional community singing activity. For example, Monique Ingalls (2018) offers a thoughtful analysis of mediated participation in evangelical Christian communities, considering the use of media in both public worship and private devotion. Technological developments have also facilitated new forms of mediated community singing, such as the virtual choir, pioneered by choral composer and conductor Eric Whitacre in 2009 (and considered here in a chapter by Cole Bendall). Although this form attracted both popular and scholarly interest, virtual choirs engaged only a small fraction of global singers in the 2010s, and mediation remained a marginal concern in the study of community singing.

Then, as a result of the pandemic and its accompanying social distancing measures, mediation became a pressing concern for everyone involved in collective music-making. Singers around the world sought ways to safely carry on their activities using any means available, acquiring new technological skills at a rapid pace. Some turned to video conferencing platforms such as Zoom. Others favored low-latency communications software such as Jamulus or Soundjack, took to participating in or crafting virtual choirs, or found satisfaction in social media platforms such as TikTok. Many of our Handbook contributors found that they had no choice but to address these innovations, and others were recruited in response to pandemic developments. Three chapters in this section—Bendall’s “Virtual Choirs and Issues of Community Choral Practice,” Joshua S. Duchan’s “Community Singing in the Age of Coronavirus: The Case of Collegiate A Cappella,” and Kay Norton’s “What the Pandemic Couldn’t Take Away: Group Singing Benefits That Survived Going Online”—focus primarily on pandemic-era singing practices, yet their findings remain relevant even as communities resume in-person singing. Without a doubt, pandemic-related developments both in mediation technology itself and in the habits and skills of singers have permanently altered the landscape of participatory music-making.

As a longtime scholar of media and community singing, I found myself reflecting on the antecedents to pandemic-era participation and tracing continuous threads from the earliest experiments into the 2020s. The outcomes of these meditations are in my own chapter, “Mediated Community Singing,” which I drafted in the first months of the pandemic. Most of the other authors in this section kindly read and responded to my work, and several applied elements of my model in their own chapters. The result is a section that, while hardly planned in advance, is remarkably cohesive, covering historic, recent, and pandemic-driven uses of media to facilitate singing activity.

Participation in all forms of mediated community singing requires imagination—at least if one seeks any sense of membership in a singing community. Mediation can connect participants and facilitate collaboration across time and space, but it does not fully reveal participants to one another, rendering them “visible” and “knowable” to various degrees. For Cook, consumers of sing-along advertising are encouraged to imagine themselves as belonging to a “community of consumption” that includes seen and unseen members. Cook tracks the growth of these imagined communities over the course of the 20th century as consumers were urged to express loyalty, through singing, to increasingly sprawling and decentralized brands. In some cases, such as the 1940s-era Odeon National Cinema Club, consumers sang as part of an in-person, local patronage but were encouraged to situate themselves within an imagined national community (“We’re a hund-red thou-sand strong / So how can we all be wrong?”). In others, such as a 1960s television ad for Aeroplane Jelly, home viewers were tasked with imagining the brand’s vast singing consumer base—other Australians, like themselves, who were likewise singing with the onscreen lyrics in their own homes.

Along these same lines, a distinction might be drawn between in-person communities that pursue virtual activities and communities that exist solely in virtual spaces. Duchan’s investigation concerns the former, although lines are blurred when we consider the virtual audition process by which collegiate a cappella groups added new members in the fall of 2020. Bendall reports that virtual choir projects are the most successful—in terms of both completion rates and participant experience—when the contributors belong to a pre-existing community for whom participation is an extension of in-person social activity, but also provides accounts of robust singing communities, such as the Stay At Home Choir, that formed in virtual spaces. Norton, however, describes a case in which members of an in-person choir were profoundly unhappy with online singing, to the extent that they abandoned it altogether. In contrast, some of the most robust communities of virtual Sacred Harp singers I encountered in my own research formed online in the first months of the pandemic (Morgan-Ellis 2021).

Do contemporary modes of online singing constitute an entirely new form of musicking, or are they merely extensions of existing practice? A similar question was asked in 2013 by David Borgo, who distinguished between “musicking that uses newer technologies primarily for the creation of conventional musicking products, practices, and occasions” and “approaches that explore the unique affordances of digital and network technologies” (Borgo 2013, 322). Authors in this section consider both threads of development, offering diverse perspectives on the nature and role of virtual participation. Bendall posits “that virtual choirs present modes of musical practice and group identity in online communities that differ from pre-existing synchronous choral practice and are, in some instances, at odds with that practice,” a position that he supports with evidence drawn from observation and experience. About 63% of Norton’s survey respondents seem to endorse this perspective, reporting that the benefits they received from online singing were completely or slightly “different” from those of in-person singing. However, the remaining 37% found that they were the “same,” with a remarkable 8% indicating that they were “completely the same.” This range reflects the wide variety of reasons for which individuals engage in group singing, but it also reflects diverse experiences with mediation, which provides a varyingly immersive and authentic experience to individual singers.

In his autoethnographic investigation, “Singing into a Smartphone: The Persuasive Affordances of Collaboration on Karaoke and Lip-Syncing Apps,” Byrd McDaniel reports “a sense of separation” that sets the experience of app-based singing apart from in-person karaoke. While in-person activity would be framed by conversation on musical and non-musical topics, an evaluation of the audience, and discussion of potential song choices, all of this is excised in the virtual setting, which furthermore encourages users to seek out “niche subcultures” in which they do not need to negotiate matters of taste. Duchan’s analysis, on the other hand, finds all of the subjects’ pandemic-era activities—whether related to video production, the use of social media, or the display of “check in” behaviors—to be rooted in their pre-pandemic routines, although the author identifies a shift in “ontological priority” from live performance to the production of recordings.

Whether one identifies virtual singing as a new mode of participation or an extension of in-person practice, it is clear that media can afford new possibilities for musicking. These include collaborating over enormous distances, perhaps with celebrities (McDaniel); being simultaneously “up-close” to all other participants (Bendall); engaging as both performer and audience member (Bendall); and hearing solo voices within collective music-making contexts (Norton). Some of these affordances reflect limitations or incidental characteristics of the media, while others reveal the intent of designers and users. Although my own research into COVID-era music-making has emphasized the misuse of social media and teleconferencing platforms, McDaniel reminds us to consider the coercive nature of interactive media, which always encourage certain modes of engagement above others.

Several of these chapters push at the bounds of what constitutes “community singing.” Cook considers examples in which a singing community is represented (e.g., the famous 1971 “Hilltop” ad for Coca-Cola) and remote participation is possible, but not necessarily expected. However, the viewer is meant to imagine themselves as part of the onscreen community; by extension, therefore, they must imagine themselves singing with that community, for it is explicitly a singing community. Is imagined participation “community singing”? McDaniel considers the practice of lip-synching, in which the participant silently mouths a text sung by someone else. Although no new sounds are produced, McDaniel persuasively argues that this is indeed “community singing,” which he defines as “a performance of singing meant to be circulated on a social media platform.” While McDaniel expands what might be considered “singing,” in my own chapter I interrogate the “community” angle, suggesting that if we accept that idea that communities can be imaginatively conjured through mediation, perhaps “almost all singing is community singing.”

Multiple authors emphasize the ways in which media can make community singing accessible for participants. McDaniel describes lip synching as “a form of accessible singing,” enabling participation for those with non-normative bodies due to visual, auditory, or vocal impairments. Bendall observes that virtual choirs can increase accessibility for some while diminishing it for others, given the necessary technical expertise and potential costs. Norton documents multiple positive dimensions to online singing, including access for those who are geographically isolated, the ability for those self-conscious about their developing skills to sing “on mute,” and the reduction of stress for introverts and those with social anxiety. She draws special attention to those who are homebound, whether due to caregiving responsibilities, illness, or disability, who were denied access to group singing before the pandemic but gained access when singing activities went virtual. Norton reports commitments from singing communities to retain hybrid and virtual singing options even after the immediate need has abated, and reminds us that there is work to be done to ensure equitable access to the benefits of participatory singing.