Online vs. In-Person Auditions – Chance for All to be Heard

With remote learning becoming the norm at the beginning of the pandemic and lingering as we enter our third year of COVID-19, some aspects of activity programs have found their way to either Zoom or some other type of online presence.

These include musical auditions for every type of ensemble from a select choir within a school to the national honors ensembles. And while there is an educational component to any opportunity to perform music, especially when verbal or written feedback on that effort is to be provided, auditions are competitions. Competitions must be fair and equitable to be valid, and when everyone does the same thing in the same manner, receiving the same adjudication, that is fair. And it is fair regardless of what is required, how it is provided, and how it receives evaluation.

As the mitigations required to keep students safe continue to adjust to the current science, climate and level of local concern, many audition organizers find that they must provide both the opportunity for an in-person adjudication and some type of online evaluation. The technology required is available to most music educators; however, in the process, do we lose the equity that is paramount to the student and teacher finding real value in the experience?

How do you capture the one-time-and-done feeling of an in-person audition on a video or audio recording? How do we ensure that the intrinsic qualities of music present during a live performance come through a monitor and set of speakers – and do so even if they were not captured properly by the recording or transmitting equipment? The simple answer is that you can’t, and through that admission acknowledge that comparing one to the other is not fair.

But the other options are even worse. Requiring every student to perform in-person dictates that some who are unable to do so cannot participate. And requiring every student to submit a video recording puts those who have little or no adult support or technical knowledge at a disadvantage or removes them from consideration. That leaves us with one choice to allow all to participate – a basic tenet for all music educators.

The evaluation criteria need to be altered enough to remove the technological limitations to make it as fair as possible while keeping the educational value of the audition intact. Subjective as musical adjudication is, its core must remain a set of specific criteria that every performer strives to meet fully.

Luckily, the technology to capture a quality audio or video recording is in most people’s pockets – their smartphone. And with some basic guidelines, those devices can produce a fairly accurate representation of a musical performance. While some schools may have more advanced recording gear available (along with a more tech-savvy teacher), requiring everyone to use the basic recording app on their smartphone makes sure that the recordings are all on the same footing. With trust in your colleagues, the requirement to have the teacher introduce the student at the beginning of the recording ensures that first, the adjudicator knows who is performing, and second, that this is the one-and-done recording of the audition, done during the timeframe required for participation.

With a smartphone device requirement, the one musical criterion that needs adjustment is dynamics. The smartphone’s recording will not capture changes in volume accurately as the app adjusts any highs and lows it captures to be more in the middle. While you can tell when a recorded musician is attempting to include dynamic contrast in the performance, the quality and range of that contrast is flattened by the phone’s algorithms. To compensate for this on your adjudication rubric or ballot, dynamics can be either removed as a category or reduced in value, especially when compared to the other criteria that can easily be evaluated from a video recording – technique, tone, rhythmical and melodic accuracy, and others. This change in the criteria should be done for any audition aspects where dynamics is considered including sight-reading and used for both recorded and in-person auditions.

By having the teacher verify the recording, by requiring that everyone use adequate but equivalent technology to produce the recording, and by adjusting the criteria to devalue or remove the performance aspects that are not well-conveyed in those recordings, one can fairly equate in-person auditions to video ones. Using a quality adjudication rubric or ballot should then produce a rating that will support the selection and seating of students in the honor choir, all-state ensemble or national honor group. And while not perfect, it allows all who wish to make the effort to audition the chance to be heard and considered. And that is the fairest approach of all.

Supplemental Document: Guidelines for Audition Video Recordings.