Threshold
performance, photography, three-channel video, surround sound

Threshold brings together voices from the Threshold Choir—an a cappella group trained to sing at bedside in hospice and palliative care—with the voices of residents at Palo Alto’s Lytton Gardens senior community. After singing with the residents for several months, Mel Day and Jeanne C. Finley organized a participatory concert with the residents.  A team from Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, recorded and enhanced the singers’ voices, so they sounded as though they were singing in the Stanford Memorial Church.  The team popped a balloon in the church, recorded the sound, and used the recording to apply the church’s acoustic signature to the singers’ voices.

Visual and audio recording from the concert was edited into a three-channel video with surround sound that visualizes the event and the simultaneous transformation of its sound from the institutional nursing home into a sacred space of beauty. Threshold transports the singers of Lytton Gardens and memorializes Lytton residents who have passed away by exploring communal, contemplative and transitional experiences through the effects of light, sound, sight and imagination.

Project/Exhibition dates

Zero 1, Palo Alto Art Center, Oct 2012 – Apr 2013