DESCRIPTION:

The project had previously been set up in rough form in order to establish proof of concept for the acoustic effect. The following is a description of the experience of that first group viewers:

As the viewers entered the project they heard a low murmur. The sound was undoubtedly speech, but the content was unintelligible. A viewer approached a speaker more closely, hoping to hear more clearly the message being transmitted. She put her ear right up to the megaphone. Others did the same, but to no avail. Each speaker is projecting only a small window of the frequency range of the human voice. The northernmost speaker may only be transmitting the high frequencies of the voice, producing an occasional “ssst… ssst ssst… sssssst,” while the southwest speaker may transmit only a low-mid frequency band, sounding something like a man speaking into a pillow, but still indistinguishable.

Finally, one of the viewers stands in the very center of the arrangement, the point of the room furthest away from any one speaker but equidistant to all, and listens very carefully. The content of the speech reveals itself as all the frequency ranges converge at the central point of room. The voice is reciting Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, originally delivered in 1865 to a nation deeply divided along ideological lines that were also delineated by political geography. The other viewers understood the auditory effect soon after and began to come together at the audio focal point. They huddled shoulder to shoulder in the center of the room. Standing together, they listened to not one voice but to a multiplicity of voices arranged all around them, reciting one of the most astonishing moments of clarity in the face of sacrifice, ideological divide, and atonement in American history.

CLICK HERE TO READ A TEXT TRANSCRIPTION OF LINCOLN'S SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS