An invite to sing with a thousand voices…

This ten-minute augmented reality journey offers an opportunity to experience and participate in a chorus of a thousand voices, as a modern simulation of a moment when a thousand people sang together on Valentine's Day in 1893 in the former Penryn Methodist Church, now Arts Centre Penryn. 

Conceived by Hannah Wood, in collaboration with Frances Crow of Crow Architecture as part of the University of Plymouth's Entrepreneurial Futures programme, it is an R&D experiment with heritage acoustics and interactive song. 

The project has included: 

• Collaboration with composer and choir leader Verity Standen through interactive choral workshops to research and develop the interactive sound world of the experience. 

• The use of real-time engines to integrate a point cloud representation of the church building and an impulse recording of the space to digitally recreate the acoustics of the original church. The original acoustic plan was designed so a thousand people could hear the voice of one preacher from the pulpit, a design our community-driven experience subverts. 

The A Thousand Voices Immersive Experience builds on the Church Records archive's creative preservation of the social and material history of the building and links to Story Juice's ongoing interest in immersive sound, which is also being developed through our project Shimmer and an R&D project with the UK's leading landscape theatre company Wildworks, also initiated by the Entrepreneurial Futures programme.