24 Hour Choir: Towards a Civic Ethics in Improvisation

Abstract

24 Hour Choir was a participatory sound project in which over one hundred members of the public sustained the human voice, uninterrupted, across an entire day. The location was the politically fraught area of The Rocks in Sydney, Australia, from which long-standing social housing tenants had recently been evicted. 24 Hour Choir responded to this situation by establishing a sonic means to build solidarity. Singers followed several open-ended instructions that required them to develop individual cooperative strategies inducing a form of civic duty. The results, sonically influenced by the shifting ambience of the city, became a real-time mapping of social relations. 24 Hour Choir is part of the project Super Critical Mass which brings together temporary communities to undertake shared sonic actions in public spaces. Each event is a structured improvisation in which participants’ skills become the parameters for a memorised, behavioural algorithm, extending precedents by Cornelius Cardew and Pauline Oliveros.