A Cathedral Without Walls — A Distributed Concert Interface for Collective Sound-Making

NeuroSynaptic Glass IV — Jazz Cathedral

Eduardo Romaguera (Durome)

Interactive audiovisual work for distributed performance and global activation

Jazz Cathedral is not a digital instrument in the conventional sense. It is a living interface — a space where sound is not “played” so much as summoned, shaped, and released through the simplest human gesture: touch.

At first encounter, the work feels almost disarmingly direct. A click becomes a chord. A glide becomes a harmonic drift. A hand, moving across the screen, becomes a performer in real time. Yet beneath this immediacy lies something more elusive: a proposition about what performance can mean today — when presence is fragmented, when audiences are dispersed, and when the act of listening has become both urgent and endangered.

Romaguera’s work constructs a kind of cathedral without architecture: no stone, no walls, no fixed acoustics. Instead, it is built from resonance, latency, and attention — a sacred space composed entirely of the immaterial. It invites the audience not simply to witness sound, but to inhabit it, to become complicit in its unfolding. The spectator is no longer outside the artwork. They are inside its nervous system.

What emerges is neither repetition nor predictability. The piece behaves as a responsive organism: each interaction generates a new constellation of harmonies, a new topology of sonic movement. It is a music of becoming — not a finished object, but an event that continuously rewrites itself through the body of whoever arrives.

Most critically, Jazz Cathedral opens a powerful curatorial horizon: the possibility of distributed concerts — parallel activations taking place across multiple cities, countries, time zones. A festival in one location can be echoed by a spontaneous performance elsewhere. A gesture in Valencia can trigger an atmosphere in Seoul, Lagos, Berlin, São Paulo, or Reykjavik. The work becomes an instrument of global co-presence: not a livestream, but a networked ritual, where sound is created rather than transmitted.

In an era obsessed with high-resolution spectacle, Jazz Cathedral returns us to something more fundamental: the ethics of attention. It asks what it means to touch, to listen, to remain — and how technology might become not a tool of distraction, but a medium of intimacy and shared perception.

This is not merely interactive art. It is a platform for contemporary performance — a scoreless concert architecture. A space where improvisation becomes a form of philosophy, and where each participant, knowingly or not, contributes to a larger question:

How can we still gather, when the world is everywhere?

NeuroSynaptic Glass IV — Jazz Cathedral