Music & Mindfulness Online: Making Meaningful Meetings Matter
— Transforming Organizations, Revitalizing Communities and Developing Human Potential
Most of us are working virtually at the moment. So while we aren’t physically running from one meeting to the next – like our hero nurses run from patient to patient – it seems we are rushing from one video conference to the next to a webinar to a call to . . .
We invite you to pause, take a breath, and consider how music and mindfulness can help you and your virtual meeting participants feel more aligned and engaged. If you are checking out any of the videos linked below, including the session recording from our webinar on the subject from April 3, I recommend headphones!
A moment of silence
One of the simplest ways to open and align a session is to have a simple moment of silence [thanks to Steve Piersanti from Berrett-Koehler for teaching me this practice]. Another way to achieve this kind of ‘pattern interrupt,’ which research shows helps us reset and concentrate, is to share a piece of music.
Sharing (pre)recorded music
I find that piano music works especially well – it is rather universal. I particularly like using selections from Eldad Zitrin’s ‘A Train View’ album because of the way the video clips shows his hands and give our eyes something to focus on – without taking the focus away from the music – actually deepening the musical impact by connecting it to a tangible, physical experience.
When sharing a music video from youtube or vimeo or another platform in a Zoom session, be sure enable the “Share computer sound” option when you share your screen [see 06:48 in the session recording video linked below for details].
A good joke or funny anecdote
Another great way to enable a pattern reset/ pattern-interrupt is in a great joke or funny anecdote that transports your participants, if for a moment, into a different headspace.
Mindful breathing
Another great way to set a mindful stage for successful virtual meetings are brief breathing exercises as well as sharing short [less than 2 min.] videos with mindfulness exercises [see 7:30 - 10:30 in the session recording].
A resource list is available at https://tinyurl.com/meetingmindful. Roland Sullivan always recommends Swami Sivananda’s breath: Inhale to a count of 4 - hold 2 counts - exhale 8 counts.
LIVE music on Zoom
But what about making and sharing music ‘LIVE’ on Zoom? The biggest hurdle is the level of audio quality available for live music making in a virtual space – i.e. not playing pre-recorded audio, but relying on real-time audio processing for music making in your session. A number of factors are at play: (1) Your microphone/ instrument/ sound source. (2) How your mic/ audio is connected to your session device (laptop/tablet/phone). (3) Your internet/ WiFi quality and stability. (4) How busy the Zoom servers are. (5) The quality of your respective participants internet connection. (6) Are the headphones/ speakers your participants are using built for music? (7) What audio processing, background noise suppression, compression, etc. is enabled for your sound?
Let’s tackle some of those issues: The No.1 challenge for virtual music, especially with the exponentially increased online traffic in the midst of COVID-19 is bandwidth. Audio data that moves through the internet is always ‘transported’ in data packets that only transport a representation of the actual sound you would head if you sat in the same room with the musicians:
Picture a photograph that has been cut into one millimeter-wide sections from top to bottom. Now, while leaving the overall photo intact, remove every other 1mm-wide section from the image. You can still tell what the image is – but at a lower ‘resolution’ – because half the photo is now missing. Audio file compression works somewhat like that. Now how much of that file-compressed audio makes it through the fiber/ wifi/ bluetooth/ etc. connections to get to your ears – that is another matter entirely. To save bandwidth for all audio, even in ‘non-musical’ contexts, it can sometimes help to stop your video to give the audio more bandwidth [see 12:10 in the session recording].
Why does the piano/ the guitar sound so tinny?
Video conferencing platforms use a variety of audio-processing algorithms that work very well to improve the soundquality for speech:
Auto volume/compression = Zoom will boost your vocal volume when it gets too low and make it a bit softer when you get too loud or close to the microphone. This is great for speech, but horrible for music as softer parts of a dynamic musical performances are cut out.
Background noise suppression = Works great for the neighbour’s noisy A/C unit in the background of you talking to meeting participants, but, in a virtual live-music listening environment, this feature will also eliminate the instruments that are further in the background – often completely.
Speaker Priority = This is a phenomenon that we have noticed when making music on Zoom where – depending on bandwidth, number of open mics, number of participants – the audio feed that goes to everyone gets prioritised for what Zoom assumes is the main speaker [which it assumes to be one person at a time]. That means even when two zoom participants are trying to music together, the rest of the Zoom session may hear only one of the two.
Turning auto-volume and noise cancellation off
The good news is that Zoom lets you turn off the automatic volume adjustment and background noise suppression [check out the session recording at 14:30].
Why your choir isn’t rehearsing online
The biggest challenge for making music together online, and the reason your choir isn’t rehearsing on Zoom is: LATENCY.
Latency is the delay that results from the sound going into a microphone being processed and then send to a router and then a server and then to another server – eventually to your router or hotspot or phone and to your speaker or headphones . . . a one way trip on zoom seem to be around a half a second – so the “round trip” of you singing or playing a note in response to someone else playing a chord on a guitar, for example, can be a whole measure late, depending on the music you are making.
Now, making music despite that latency can work with some musical styles where shifting rhythmic placement of a melody is part of the phrasing (jazz, r&b for example). Jacob Collier and Tori Kelly do an amazing job in this instagram clip. But it only works with two [not three] participants where:
One is providing the main musical elements [piano/guitar/one man band …],
One is the vocalist / plays a solo instrument that carries melodic ideas.
We tried it in our session at about 26:45 of the recording.
Now, there are some musics where latency don’t matter (as much) – and that is music built on drones. We tried this too, at 28:45 - unfortunately, I had set the harmonium drone a bit too loud. But this works in virtual sessions – even with lots of participants! You can try this at home sometime too – just chant with a drone: Your vacuum cleaner, or a noisy fridge will make nice stand-ins for a drone.
Recording trick
If you read this far, we hope you try to be mindful, and take a breath even in your virtual sessions. And hopefully you make music still – even with latency. And since you are still reading, here is a nugget: Jeff Buckley’s version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.
Oh, and I shared a cool trick for recording music via Zoom – check out 32:28 of the session – Zoom now allows you to record seperate audio files for each participant!
For more, check out the rest of our blog.
Check out NEXUS4change’s webinar series of 30-min. high-impact change tool talks. Check our events page [www.NEXUS4change.com/events] for more.