OPOM and the GWR

I wasn't really intending to write anything for a while. But then I realised to my horror that yet another fortnight is upon me and I should probably say something interesting here. Thankfully, that ``something interesting'' aspect has been graciously taken care of by life itself.

This post is mostly about the comings and goings that occurred on last Friday and Saturday. If you haven't realised by now, I was involved in the Our People, Our Music performance hosted by the Singapore Chinese Orchestra in part as a rally for all the Chinese orchestra afficionados (and musicians), in part to provide a grand ``soft'' opening for the newly reconstructed National Stadium (or Sports Hub, depending on who you ask and when) and in part to break some Guinness World Records while we're at it as an early ``birthday gift'' for the 50th anniversary of Singapore's independence from everyone else.

I hadn't really intended to join in the rehearsal on Friday. For one, it required a full-day's worth of leave due to the timing, and for two, it was likely to become one of those rush-to-wait, wait-to-rush moments due to the sheer complexity involved in moving thousands of people about. Hell, even when I was at the company level of my BMT unit, it already took us some time just to coordinate the movement of a platoon with expert human movers (drill sergeants), and if we scale it up to the thousands involved with less competent human movers (volunteers), the effect was going to be multiplied by ten-fold at the very least.

But in the end, my incipient headache was the deciding factor. It was probably worth the effort to get my ass out there and then spend the waiting time trying to rest while making good use of the actual time that was used for the rehearsal. I took my whole day leave and joined in the rehearsals on Friday.

Travelling to the new National Stadium wasn't that big of a deal considering that the bus ride was catered for. It was once we were in the holding area (Hall 1) where things started to get hairy. The throng of people that were there was not something to laugh at, and to make matters worse they were mostly school-going children. I have nothing against children, but the sheer numbers of them meant that things weren't going to be smooth sailing, because I was a kid once and I knew how rambunctious they can get when they are away from school and are at what is effectively a field trip. It was packed but it never did devolve into outright chaos---the most was mere inefficiencies in terms of movement (and itchy fingers with respect to expensive equipment; but more on that later).

The food was alright. I had erred on the side of caution against shrimp paste anything and ate vegetarian for both days. It wasn't the best of choices because at the end of each day I found myself demanding an extra McDonald's fillet meal to fill me back up to something more tolerable, but it sufficed.

One of the biggest problems that we faced from the get go was the problem of synchronisation. The conductor of a five thousand strong orchestra must necessarily be bloody hard to see from all corners of the field, and to counter that they had a camera that was always directed at him to capture his conducting actions to project on to two large jumbotrons that were facing the field in the direction in which the mega-orchestra was facing. The catch was of course latency, something that Prof Dannenberg taught me a long long time ago during the Computer Music class. And in this case, the latency was bad---there was a delay of between 250ms to 500ms between when he does his action and when that action appears on the jumbotrons. Now, if everyone followed one or the other, there would be no problem, and since we are talking about a large number of people, of course everyone followed the conductor differently. The resultant cacophony was jarring---we were off by up to one quaver in some places. It was terrible. I highlighted it to a crew member who managed to feed back up to the control team who told the marshal at some point about the issue and somehow it ended with everyone synchronising with the conductor as shown on the jumbotrons.

The conductor himself had to make his actions early relative to the sound he got from the monitors to ensure we all played in time, something that made me respect him all the more.

So with the synchronisation problem fixed up by the time we got to our third major rehearsal (two on Friday, one on Saturday before the event), we were gold.

My corner of the section was quite sad. Apart from representatives from our orchestra, the rest seemed a little lacklustre in comparison. I'm not sure if it was because they didn't really play/didn't know how to play, or that I was paying too damn close attention to keeping in time with the conductor that I had tunnel vision and could not pay any attention to what they were up to. All in all though the section managed to pull through and things went by smooth.

We managed to set/break two records too: largest Chinese Orchestra and largest Chinese Drum Ensemble (see 早报 article here).

If you have been paying some attention to my rambling, there should be one big question in your head right now. Largest Chinese Drum Ensemble? Where did that one come from?

The culprit: pellet drums or 波浪鼓.

Among the pieces that were sent out roughly six months earlier was a percussion piece that I was pretty sure no one really cared about except those who played percussion. It turned out that piece actually had parts written for the pellet drums, which everyone in the mega-orchestra was issued on the first day of the rehearsal by virtue of it sitting on our seats. Talk about a shocker, considering no one except the percussionists even have the sheet music for that piece. Nevertheless, all those problem were easily dealt with---we ended up playing a game of Simon says with the SYCO members who sat at the front of each section where the micorphones were.

My original pellet drum was finally replaced by another one when our seat positions were shifted as they tried to compact each section to remove the empty seats. The replacement was actually of an inferior quality---it sounds hard to believe that it is possible to get something of an inferior quality when we are talking about mass-produced goods, but it's true: one of the rivets holding the pellet was placed in reverse, giving it reduced holding power. And so, during the rehearsals, when I was playing on the pellet drum, that pellet flew off and disappeared. I thought I would never see it again until happenstance revealed its location just as we were done with the performance and were heading back. Needless to say, I picked it up and reattached it to the drum once again. I knew from the get-go that the pellet drums were some sort of souvenir (it was a logistical nightmare to collect 5000+ pellet drums; moreover what the hell were they going to do with them given that they had stuck on both sides of each drum stickers commemorating OPOM 2014?) and was actually quite glad that I could find the missing pellet. Now that bugger is sitting in the display case with all the other random pieces of memoramblia I have collected while living this life.

I think I'm out of stories to tell for now. I had told a lot of them before to my mum, but somehow writing those out feels more of a chore than anything else. Maybe I'll write something more abstract and coherent next time.