hammertoe

We just found out yesterday that Choirless is now through to the final 3 projects for the Call for Code IBMer Challenge! It has been a fantastic journey so far and we've taken Choirless from a zygote of an idea through to scaling it up to a production system.

Call for Code Global Challenge, in its third year, focused on both Climate Change and Covid-19. Over 6,500 participants collaborated to create innovations based on open source technologies.

During the UK Labs Call for Code challenge in April, myself and colleagues, Sean Tracey, and Glynn Bird started to develop Choirless. This musical collaboration platform can help choirs sing together even when they are apart. Each singer's contributed videos are automatically synchronized and stitched together into a video wall with no special equipment or costly editing software. Beyond the pandemic, Choirless has the potential to allow for ongoing musical collaboration without borders.

The main public Call for Code challenge has a grand prize of $200,000. As IBM employees, myself and my teammates are part of the parallel, internal, IBMer challenge for call for code. Same rules, same goals... but alas we don't get a stab at the $200,000 prize. There is a prize, but it is much more modest. But we are still aiming for it!

So far, we have had close to 100 choirs and bands register interest in beta testing the software. From churches, to barbershop choirs, to a 250-piece marching band. There is even an internal IBM team in Canada using Choirless to produce a song for another competition locally.

We will find out the final winner at the winner reveal on the 15th September. It is an internal IBM screening, but don't worry, I'll be reporting out the results here afterwards!

You can read more about Choirless here:

https://medium.com/callforcode/choirless-syncs-alonetogether-musicians-4fe68f04352e

https://mashable.com/ad/feature/in-times-of-crisis-innovations-skyrocket-2020-call-for-code/