Global Whistling Championship 2020 Participant Feedback

The IWG has compiled all of the feedback from the whistlers of the Global Whistling Competition 2020 and below is a response to some of the main topics. We thank everyone who provided feedback. Whether it was positive or negative feedback, everything was clear and constructive. We will use this feedback to continue to improve our competitions and events in the future.

Competition Format

Overall, most people liked the format of GWC 2020, with 87% of respondents liking the format of having a single category with two rounds. As for the platform, 94% of respondents liked the YouTube format, so the IWG will likely hold events on this platform in the future. With that being said, one of the most frequent comments we had was suggesting future competitions have more categories. This is likely to happen in future competitions. The GWC 2020 was the first online competition of it’s kind and the IWG wanted to simplify it to see how feasible the idea was. An early decision was made to have only 1 open category to allow anyone to enter and keep things as simple as possible for everyone involved.

One question we received several times was whether there would be a YouTube playlist of the Top 25 videos on our YouTube channel. We created a playlist during the competition, but left it private during the competition to encourage people to view the videos on our website and vote for their favorites. We have made this playlist public, though some of the videos may not be included due to technical reasons. The playlist can be found at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JQAu9a5r6g&list=PL65sVRrPRgx50cIm37Cj4qWqga3GG-LzY

Public Voting

We received many comments about the public voting system for the GWC 2020 and we wanted to address this topic in detail. The IWG originally implemented the GWC 2020 with the addition of public voting in order to achieve three main goals:

1. Encourage the public to be more involved
2. Introduce a well-known feature of other musical competitions
3. Be a unique feature of the GWC competition

Since we were making this an online competition, we wanted to have some way to have audience interaction other than commenting on videos, so there was some way for people to feel more involved in the event. Having a public voting feature seemed like a natural way to add audience interaction and it has been a popular way to let fans interact with other competitions like T.V. talent shows.

Having a public voting system is also a way to encourage people to spread awareness about the competition which could potentially introduce musical whistling to people who had never heard of it before. We decided to enforce three separate votes per person in order to encourage people to watch more of the videos, not just the one that their friend or family member made. The participants' videos received a total of at least 70,000 views in the single month of the competition and the finalists received votes from 4,400 individuals. This is all thanks to your passionate efforts in promoting these whistling videos to your friends, family and through the media.

The IWG also wanted the winner of the GWC competitions to be a whistler who did a performance that would appeal not only to the judges, but also to non-musicians; a musical performance that was universally striking.

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After reflecting on the use of public voting in the GWC 2020, the IWG will heavily consider whether or not to add public voting to future competitions. The IWG still thinks there is value to the addition of public voting, but two main considerations will be carefully made:

1. In future competitions, public voting may not affect the overall winner (i.e., there may be a separate category/award where public voting counts)
2. In future competitions, public voting score may have a lower percentage in the overall score

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Some respondents were asking how some of the top scorers weren’t in the top 3 of one or both of the separate categories (i.e., judges scoring and public voting). This happened due to the percentages used and the combination of both categories being high rather than just 1 being high. With public voting accounting for 20% of the final score in the GWC 2020, the final placing of the contestants was greatly affected by the public voting component because many of the competitors had very close scores from the judges. To illustrate how this could happen, the following are examples showing how the results can change significantly due to the public voting portion (this is a hypothetical example and is not based on the real GWC 2020 results):

Over-simplified example:

Whistler A: judged score = 75; public score = 2; total = 77
Whistler B: judged score = 60; public score = 12; total 72
Whistler C: judged score = 70; public score = 9; total = 79

Thorough example to show Top 10 movement (table sorted by top Judges Score):

Rules

Throughout the GWC 2020 process, we had many questions regarding the competition rules, such as how to properly format the YouTube video, what was allowed in accompaniments, and what our policy was on adding mechanical reverb. Since there were so many rule questions and feedback from our survey, we plan to improve the rules for the next event to ensure that they are as straightforward and simple as possible.

We got a significant amount of feedback on one rule in particular, which was that no mechanical reverb was allowed in the videos. The IWG took the potential use of mechanical reverb, inclusion of the whistled melody in the accompaniment, and all other audio inconsistencies stated in the rules extremely seriously. During the submission phase of the competition, the IWG Founders and judges listened to every video and discussed if anybody noticed any potential use of mechanical reverb. There were many videos that sounded like they had reverb, and all of these participants were contacted. Every participant contacted was very open and honest with how they recorded their videos and some of them did accidentally use reverb that was not allowed in the rules, while others chose to record in environments with natural reverb (which was allowed). Those videos confirmed to have mechanical reverb were removed from the competition and were remade by the participant without the reverb. All videos kept in the competition and considered for the final round were determined to be within the stated rules. However, since it raised questions for many, we will reassess in detail the rules around the recording environment and use of natural reverb for future IWG competitions.

Individual Feedback for Participants

The top comment from respondents was the potential to receive more detailed feedback in the future. This will be considered for all future competitions, however, there is already a large amount of work required from the IWG and competition judges to listen to all of the videos and provide scores as well as screen videos for rule violations. More feedback than what was provided during GWC 2020 will likely add to entry costs to facilitate the added work it will take, particularly from our competition judges.

Future IWG Activities

The top five most requested future activities for the IWG were the following (in order of popularity):

1. Whistling showcase for fun
2. Whistling Olympics
3. Whistling Masterclass
4. Newsletter
5. Long-term multi-round competition

The IWG will take these suggestions into consideration and determine which of these we will be able to do in the future.

Final Notes

The IWG founders have been so encouraged by all of the enthusiastic feedback and well wishes from our competitors. From the feedback we have received, many people were overall happy about how this event went and are looking forward to future events. In fact, 77% of respondents said that they would definitely compete again, while the remaining 23% said that they might compete again (meaning nobody said they definitely wouldn’t compete again).

We are so appreciative of all of the many responses we had to this survey and we are glad you took the time to give such detailed feedback on this first ever GWC online whistling competition. We are taking all of your feedback into consideration for our future events, but due to space we decided to only directly address some of the top comments in this response. If you had feedback that you would like an answer about from us, feel free to Contact us and we will answer your question to the best of our abilities.