They Sang Together Across 8,000 Miles. Everything They Heard Had Already Happened.

Nearly 8,000 miles (12,800 km) separated these four singers. Two in Los Angeles, one in Canberra, one in Melbourne. One recording of Amazing Grace, sung together.

Here is the part that sounds impossible: not one of them ever heard another singer in the present tense. Every voice in their headphones had already happened.

That is not a limitation we are apologizing for. It is the design. Sound takes time to cross the Pacific, and no amount of engineering repeals that. So we stopped trying. Instead of syncing singers to each other, we sync every singer to a shared reference. Distance stops being a variable.

How a remote choir rehearsal actually works

This recording was made in two takes. In the first, the four sang to a piano track. They heard the piano and nothing else.

Then we fed that first take back to them as the reference for the second.

So on take two, they were singing with each other, just one take removed. Their reaction was the interesting part. One of them put it this way: it emulated a real choir experience, where you listen to certain voices doing certain things and you match them. Another, hearing the playback: it's incredible how much more together we are.

You will hear the rest of their comments after the song.

What you are hearing is the final mix, each singer captured on a separate track, the same thing a live audience would have heard a few seconds after they sang it.

And we turned the piano off. The scaffolding comes down. The building stands.

The singers

• Alex Siegers, Venice, California (director and alto) — alexsiegers.com
• Cody Christopher, Dickson, ACT, Australia (tenor)
• Gabbi Coenen, Sherman Oaks, California (soprano)
• William Darbyshire, Clifton Hill, VIC, Australia (bass)

In our second video from this session, the same four singers do something different. No reference track at all. Alex conducts live, and the other three watch her hands. Read that one here.