Masked songs

There was a full moon a few days ago, which means that the Hebrew date was the 14th of Av. For reasons unknown to me, this date marks 'the festival of love', in stark contrast the fast day of 9th Av, which commemorates the destruction of the second temple.

The cultural committee on the kibbutz decided to celebrate the locked down love festival in an unusual way: members were invited to sing a love song and act it out for the camera whilst being masked and generally incognito. The public were required to identify the singers, and the least identified singer would receive a prize. 

Even though the anonymity should mean that there would be no voting blocs (see my blog about the last kibbutz song festival), this opportunity didn't tempt me. To my surprise and secret delight, my wife, though, was interested and she had a song in mind. So I spent a great deal of time creating a suitable arrangement for this song; the key was fine, but I had to slow it down to only 70 bpm, which is the slowest tempo I have ever used. After several revisions, I developed an arrangement which met with the artist's approval.

Recording the vocals was quite easy: my wife is much better at pitching than me (i.e. singing in tune), but her timing is not particularly good. I had to count her in a few times, and even so, I can hear parts of the tune which are out of time. After mixing the song, the final track was about 3 minutes 15 seconds long. We were then told that the song had to be a maximum of 2 minutes 40 seconds, so I had to mutilate the song in order to meet this requirement. Chopping out the introduction, link in the middle and coda did the trick.

The singers were filmed last Saturday, but in order to achieve surprise, each singer was called at a different time, so none of them knew who the others were. Yesterday evening, the completed nine clips were shown via YouTube, and members had to guess who they were. This was surprisingly hard: we managed to identify three out of the other eight singers but had not a clue who the others were.

The singer who was least identified was still recognised by 32 people, which means that my wife was recognised by more than this number. This surprised us somewhat as we imagined that few people had heard her sing in recent years.

What was - IMHO - the worst song naturally won the prize for the best song. There is no accounting for taste.

The video can be seen here.