San Francisco Girls Choir breaks down travel barriers by using JackTrip

The San Francisco Girls Chorus is more than a local institution. Their widely acclaimed ensembles have sung at events like the 2009 presidential inauguration of Barack Obama and have been honored with official San Francisco Girls Chorus Day proclamations by the mayor of San Francisco. They regularly participate in San Francisco Opera productions, tour internationally, and have performed with Kronos Quartet, Chanticleer, and the San Francisco Symphony. With over a dozen releases, they’ve even won multiple ASCAP and GRAMMY awards. In short, they’ve been blazing national and even global trails for nearly four and a half decades, offering music education to girls 4-18 that is second to none.

When COVID struck, the San Francisco Girls Chorus (SFGC) faced the challenges of meeting in person. Being an institution that relies on gathering in person, the group had to be innovative in order to perform and practice. The SFGC turned to JackTrip Labs to enable singers, accompanists, and conductors to make music simultaneously without the delays of other online meeting platforms like Zoom. SFGC’s more advanced ensembles have been using JackTrip Virtual Studio for both rehearsals and performances since 2021.

The renowned girls choir program typically was available to students in the local San Francisco area. SFGC wanted to expand its reach throughout the region. For girls who lived further from SFGC encountering unreasonable commute times, it was unfeasible to attend in-person rehearsals regularly.

Put yourself in the shoes of a parent with a daughter who is a talented singer, but because you live in a small community some 200 miles away, you can’t access SFGC even though your daughter is deserving of that level of training.

The Chorus’ forward-thinking leadership has partnered up with JackTrip Labs to create an online curriculum named SFGConnect as a new and regular part of the Chorus’s educational program starting in Fall 2022. SFGConnect is now part of the Chorus’s regular Level I curriculum to singers ages 7-10. SFGC Connect gives these promising young voices the chance to learn from the SFGC even if they live many miles outside of the Bay Area or are otherwise unable to attend in-person rehearsals.

This ground-breaking virtual curriculum is made possible by JackTrip’s revolutionary Virtual Studio, which enables real-time music collaboration over hundreds of miles with high-quality audio–truly the next best thing to being in the same room.

The new result: cutting edge of music meets the cutting edge of tech. SFGConnect is a new innovative pilot program that offers SFGC’s full choral and music theory curriculum to choral students exclusively over the internet. As rigorous and rewarding as the in-person program, SFGConnect pushes the limits of music education astronomically, bringing it into a whole new realm by way of JackTrip’s real-time collaboration tool.

The San Francisco Girls Choir has broken down the commute time barriers of traveling to attend rehearsal. “ We can reach out to girls who are living throughout California, and maybe, if it’s possible later, throughout the country. Maybe around the world.”

“All of a sudden, with this innovative SFGConnect program, your daughter can participate in this world-class organization to develop her musical skills to the highest level, to bond with other kids with similar capabilities” stated Alan Hu- Co-Founder of JackTrip Labs. “That social connection–that is the magic that I see here.”

Experimentation, innovation, and collaboration are at the heart of everything JackTrip Labs and SFGC do. SFGConnect promises to realize both groups’ expansive visions.

Learn more about SFGConnect and JackTrip here:
‍https://www.sfgirlschorus.org/sfgconnect
https://www.jacktrip.com