* by which I mean "it works pretty okay for songs of up-to-medium difficulty, see below"

Rationalist Winter Solstice is (in most cities) a singalong event.

This worked extremely straightforwardly well in a living room in 2012, and in my family's Christmas Eve singalong that Rationalist Solstice was inspired by.

It works way less well in an auditorium. 

When I seek out advice about making people more singalongable, there's a cluster of advice I get from folksinger people that... seems totally "correct", but, feels... insufficiently ambitious or something. 

The advice includes things like "try to have people come in singing on the chorus, and not worry so much about the verses". Or "teach people the song beforehand" and "hold practice singalongs before the event or send out music so people can learn it", or "teach people music."

This... totally makes sense as advice, and I do do it. The way people bring it up feels a bit alien to me, like it's clearly intervening on the wrong level. It's optimizing a thing that has a lower overall effect size than another variable that I've seen accomplish way more singalongability way harder.

The other variable is "actually make people feel in their bones that singing along is okay/fine even if they're bad at singing, even if they don't know the tune."

And, alas, this mostly isn't accomplished by trying to tell people "you can sing along guys, for real! It's fine! Don't feel awkward!"

Instead it just sort of depends on a critical mass of people all believing it at once, and taking it for granted, in a setting that makes it feel like a straightforwardly true part of social reality.

In the 2012 Living Room Solstice, there were 50 people in the living room. I had invited a professional musician friend to lead a couple songs that he had wrote. Normally when he performs those songs, he carefully warms the audience up, starts the song kinda quiet but ramps up to the chorus and then signals people to sing along and the people slowly join in.

He had practiced that songleading approach beforehand for the 2012 Winter Solstice. 

It got to be his turn. He started the song.

Immediately, 50 people started singing along at full volume and enthusiasm, zero hesitation, for a song they had never heard before.

I was there. It worked. It sounded okay. Obviously some people sang some stuff wrong and AFAICT nobody cared.

It's worked fine for decades at my family's Christmas Eve party, where new friends or neighbors will come in, and have a brief moment of "wait, but I don't know the words!" and we're like "yeah whatever doesn't matter" and then they go "...okay?" and then it works and they have a great time and end the night saying "wow, I didn't know Christmas could be so awesome. You guys have, like, the sort of Christmas they make Hollywood movies about, I didn't know that was real."

It doesn't work at an auditorium. 

It might not work in a living room, if there isn't some critical mass of people who believe in it, and you don't make sure to start the evening off with songs that are silly enough that you can't really feel self-conscious about it. (I started 2012 Solstice off with everyone singing the "Game of Thrones" theme song, a las "daaah duh da da daaah duh da da  daaah duh da da  daaah duh da da  daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah")

I think it particularly doesn't work in an auditorium for two reasons: 

One, it just feels too fancy. You aren't in a living room. You feel like you're at a show, there are performers, the performers are skilled, it feels more palpable that there was something to ruin.

Two, 50 people in a living are naturally going to have a very high density, and the ceiling is low, and all the sound is compressed together so it's very obvious you're not going in on this alone. You can all clearly hear the few people who are loudly confidently singing the correct tune, which helps a lot.

In the auditorium, you're spread out – you're not smushed up against your friends on a couch. And if you're in a section of the audience where not as many people are trying to sing, it sounds a bit lame, you try singing, you sound lame, the people around you sound lame, you maybe try to push through because the Solstice Organizers are trying to be really encouraging and you want to support the intended vibe, but it's pushing uphill.

When you're 500 people, you do kinda need to be in an auditorium. There are degrees of freedom of how fancy an auditorium but most options for seating 500 people feel intrinsically formal.

Interlude: Is this real?

People don't believe me about this. Folk singers who are used to leading crowd singalongs don't believe me about this (they're the ones giving me all the advice about how to make the songs easy/singable in a way that suggests this should be a huge uphill burden).

You probably still don't believe me (given that the last few people I tried to tell this to didn't). 

First, to clarify my claim:

• In the room of 50 people, 25 were selected for "being the NY rationality community" which is not-very-much-at-all selected for musicality at the time. Another 25 were selected for "being willing to travel hundreds of miles to be at the second Rationalist Solstice", which probably has something to do with musicality. But, when I try to remember who they were, people I think of as "not good at singing" were roughly as common as people who I think of as "good at singing."
• I'm guessing about half the people were singing "on-tune-ish, although not great." I wasn't taking careful note at the time. The others were probably singing off-key in ways that was a bit cacophanous but kinda cancelled out.
• Me and the professional musician were the only people who knew his song in advance.
• I think you can cluster songs into five-ish categories of:
  • "Dead Simple, but boring"
    • (i.e. "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star")
  • "Regular, easy-ish song"
    • (most folk songs)
  • "Regular, medium-ish song"
    • (most Beatles songs, Bob Dylan songs if they're sung by anyone other than Bob Dylan)
  • "Regular, hard-ish songs"
    • (surprisingly a lot of modern pop songs, I think things started getting less singable in the 80s/90s?)
  • "Explicitly Difficult Performance Pieces"
• I'd describe the song as "medium difficulty" in the schema below. (Here is the song).
  • I think most popular Solstice songs have ended up being medium or hard-ish, which is bad, IMO, although at the 2012 Solstice more there were more easy-ish ones)

I am partly claiming "the quality of singing was higher than people seem to expect". I think people are just actually decent at singing along with medium-or-easier songs if there's a solid vocal leader and a critical mass of people are also doing it. It's, like, a thing we have evolved to do. Monkey hear, monkey do. Old school hominids didn't worry about how good they sounded. (I'd weakly guess like half of people are kinda tone-deaf but half are okay-ish)

I'm also claiming "the attitude of 'but was the singing good'?" is a way less fun attitude and an attitude that diminishes the total amount of "actually good" singalong music in the world. 

If you set the vibe "you must be this good to sing along", people don't sing along as often, then they don't get practice, then they don't become low-key-amateur-musical, then 20 years later they think of themselves as "people who don't sing" instead of "people who do" in a self-fulfilling cycle. There are cultures where it's just accepted that everyone sings, period, and then people get good at it.

This year's Bay Solstice

Now, having said all that, it also matters whether the songs are easy to sing. My family's Christmas Eve singing does start off with the easy songs you almost certainly know before working up to obscure medieval carols that you're definitely gonna stumble through.

Back in 2012-2013, I put a moderate amount of effort into making the early songs of Solstice Act I singalongable, but:

1. this the very beginning of my "write singalong songs" career and I wasn't as good at it,
2. most Solstice organizers aren't that into like the 3 specific songs I wrote with the particular aim to be singalongable Tutorial songs. And I think no one's really set out to fill this void in a comprehensive way.
3. most Solstice organizers aren't as into the concept of silly songs
4. most Solstice attendees (organizers and otherwise) are intellectual rationalists who will be kind of bored by the sort of extremely simple songs that folk music relies on.

I'm running Bay Solstice this year. 

Sizing all of this up, and holding the ambition of "the longterm musicality of Solstice attendees eventually reaches a higher level than it's currently at", and asking myself "What's hard about this? What can I do about that?"...

What's hard is:

• Auditoriums feel scarily solemn
• At least a significant fraction of people do seem to basically prefer a non-silly Solstice.
• You need a much larger critical mass of people who believe in the thing when there's 500 people than when there's 50.
• A sizeable chunk of our musical people are "choir phenotype" as opposed to "folk phenotype", where getting the notes right feels more intrinsically important.
• Existing Solstice songs are selected for being pretty complicated.
• Even if I somehow deal with all the above, it's not that useful if next year's organizer doesn't actively try to solidify and build on it, and there's not that many solstice organizers around, and insofar as they introduce new songs they prefer to use songs that they know/like that weren't originally selected for singalongability.
• The "use existing songs" trick just doesn't work that well for Easy Solstice Singalongs, because there is a particular nuanced philosophical target Solstice is trying to hit. Very few songs hit that target while also being easy and also fitting into the vibe of Act I of the program.
• "Teaching people music" feels lame and patronizing. People don't wanna feel like an elementary school teacher is trying to get them excited about music, they just wanna sing.

What I'm currently planning to do about it:

At a high level: Figure out how to give people good quality, mostly non-silly, meaningful songs that smoothly, subliminally teach people music skills along the way without noticing.

More specifically:

• Heavily prioritize Act I being "the music tutorial", instead of that being a secondary consideration
  • each song has a smoothly ramping difficulty curve
  • each song in Act I should not just introduce a Solstice Philosophical Concept, but, also, subliminally teach a little bit of music intuition.
• Write multiple new songs that try to hit the sweet spot of:
  • ...feel philosophically meaningful and, like, just be "very good songs" that future organizers are more likely to like.
  • ...are nonetheless very singalongable. (You can have complex words with simple rhythms/melodies, and you can choose simple words that nonetheless have some poetic, iconic heft to them)
  • ...each convey one of the aforementioned subliminal musical intuitions, hopefully
  • and, subject those songs to a bunch of iteration/testing/critical-feedback as much as possible beforehand
• ...try to somehow make the auditorium feel more like a living room
  • Current plan: Get rid of all the chairs in the front section and replace it with blankets and backjacks and sell "In the Front on the Floor" tickets to people who wanna opt into that, which is aiming for higher density then usual.
    • this leaves like 4/5 of the auditorium in about the same state as usual, but, if it works, can expand it a bit in future years, and/or hope that it creates more of a critical mass where unabashed musicality lives.
• Try to more actively talk through all this sort of thing with next year's organizer, and, idk, hope that goes well. (Organizers tend to come in two types, "musical" and "not-musical", I'm hoping musical ones can be sold on the vision and non-musical ones can be sold on acquiring a music lead who is sold on the vision)

Will that work? I dunno! But, I hope it does.

Anyways, meanwhile, please believe me that 50 people can totally sing along with complicated songs they haven't heard before if the conditions are otherwise right. I've seen it, dude, it's real.