Have you been thinking about hosting a small solstice in your city, but were intimidated by the logistical and musical challenges?  Things have gotten a bit easier.

If you go to any past program on the resources site, at the bottom you’ll see a link “Autogenerated Slides”.  Similarly, if you use the program builder tool, you’ll see a button to create and “autogenerated slide show” (as well as a general UI upgrade for the tool).  It’s the same slide show system.

Along the left, there’s a list of all the elements in order, and a big button labeled “next”.

For songs, it will embed an audio player if it can, based on youtube or mp3 links in the song description, bandcamp entries, checked in mp3s or (worst case) midi-generated mp3s.  And it will put the lyrics on screen with animated scrolling.  The next button goes to the next line.  (I thought about various automated ways to sync lyrics advancement with music, but none seemed robust enough).

For speeches, it will just iframe the existing text. The next button scrolls down about a third of a page.

Advancing past the end of an element brings on the next one.  Backgrounds and color themes change with section headings.

Overall, you should be able to just click “next” repeatedly, with correct timing, and all the necessary audiovisual aids should appear.  (Unless you use a song whose audio comes from embedded bandcamp, because it doesn’t support autoplay.  This is deliberate on their part, because they’ve been burned by too many audio autoplaying websites and don’t want to contribute to the problem.)  And if your timing is off, the whole thing should be pretty forgiving to that too.

It’s not as clean as costume-made slides tend to be.  Sometimes the lyrics on screen won’t be a perfect match for the recording, or will contain awkward annotations.  But for a ten-to-twenty-people-in-a-living-room event, it should suffice.  Don’t trust yourself to remember stuff?  It’s there.  Don’t trust yourself to lead melodies in tune?  Sing along to the recording.

How do I recommend using this?

Hook a laptop into a big screen (giant tv or data projector) and gather everyone in front of it a la Petrov Day.  Make sure your lighting is provided by several distinct lamps, or has a dimmer switch, so you can go dimmer and brighter at section boundaries.  Have one person whose job it is to do all laptop interaction, and one person (maybe the same) who’s in charge of lights.

Bump up the font size in the browser until it’s too big, then back down one step.  Do this on the final screen, because screens and environments effect font readability.

Keep the event small (probably a max of about 30) and host it in a home.  Set expectations that this is a communal thing, not a polished thing.

Everyone sings everything together, unless the song really wants to be in parts, in which case give your attendees some direction.  For speeches, either rotate readership every paragraph or arrange in advance who will read what.

Pick your program in advance.  If it’s a pre-existing one, just know which it is.  If it’s modified or original, email it to yourself and ideally at least one other person.  Remember that the program builder has no save feature except what you copy and paste.  Test your program in advance, in particular make sure you’re happy with the audio.  You can override audio, but you need to either post your on youtube or on a public web server as mp3.

If you stumble upon a bug, please poke me about it.  I promise to be responsive so long as it’s not the same weekend as NYC solstice.