Join is a web-based interactive music environment with algorithmically generated spatialized audio. Inspired by the music, spatial dynamics and collectivist ideology of the Sacred Harp singing tradition, the quadrophonic soundscape is generated in real time based on parameters derived from the original Sacred Harp songbook, while camera controls mapped to audio input allow the user to explore the 3D environment using only their voice.

Join was originally presented in Spring 2018 in two separate formats: first as a live performance in four-channel surround sound at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, then as a web installation at the final show at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. For this installation, users were invited to experience the piece from inside a one-of-a-kind quilted “headset” (initially designed to hold a Google Cardboard, the piece was subsequently moved from a phone to a computer screen, and the headset was expanded to function more as a shroud), and following their experience were invited to cut their own patches of scrap fabric and pin them to the quilt, which were sewn into place following the presentation.

This piece was conceived as a meditation on the concept of “sacred space” within a digital context. In our day-to-day existence online, we inhabit a variety of digital spaces — both commercial and social — that mimic corporeal spaces in function (if not form). Shopping malls, singles bars, office complexes, and countless other “real world” places now have web-based analogs — sites that fulfill the same function as their real-world counterparts while utilizing the affordances of cyberspace to improve user experience and maximize efficiency. Within this framework, what would a church look like on the internet?