An invisible choir of strangers manifests in public space using Artificial Intelligence, reconnecting people through wordless communal singing.
Ari Benjamin Meyers is an artist and composer who explores structures and processes that redefine the performative, social, and ephemeral nature of music. Trained at institutions including The Juilliard School and Yale University, Meyers has focused several recent works—including “Rehearsing Philadelphia” and “Hymnus”—on the public and civic spheres, often incorporating large-scale communal rituals.
In collaboration with Halsey Burgund, an Emmy-winning media artist and Creative Technologist in Residence at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Meyers presents Invisible Choir. In today’s divisive times, the simple act of interacting has become fraught with constant political and social baggage. The artists seek to circumvent this challenge by allowing complete strangers to create an evolving collective musical work by singing together, without words. Harnessing the power of new technologies, including Artificial Intelligence and advanced Audio AR (Augmented Reality), Invisible Choir proposes an urgent and innovative form for public spaces, facilitating collective engagement and music creation. The project aims to establish new networks of “citizen-singers.”
The installation combines urban sound design, sound ecology, and technology to create a novel type of interactive social soundscape: an ever-evolving, open-sourced choir. The work begins with musical “seeds” composed specifically for the location. The choral composition is then nurtured through the active, asynchronous participation of visitors, who become members of the invisible choir by recording their vocal contributions and “planting” them live on the spot. This is achieved via a specially designed web-based application that facilitates both singing together and listening to existing “choirs.”
Invisible Choir reimagines what a public artwork can be, showing us how music can allow us to connect with each other and our sonic environment in these polarized times.
BIO
Ari Benjamin Meyers is a Professor of Sculpture at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and regularly collaborates with leading figures in international art and music. Halsey Burgund is known as the creator of Roundware, an open-source audio AR platform, and focuses his research on the societal challenges posed by Artificial Intelligence, particularly synthetic media.
This project is part of ReSilence: Future Soundscapes & Affect Mining in Urban Ecosystems, the exhibition showcasing the outcomes of fifteen international art residencies supported by S+T+ARTS (the European Commission’s initiative for science, technology, and the arts). Through the artistic exploration of sound, ReSilence redefines urban spaces, using the acoustic dimension to analyze the complex affective and ecological relations of future cities and promote collective awareness of what lies beyond mere noise. The exhibition is presented in collaboration with BASE, as part of the FAROUT Festival 2025 edition.