Turquoise rugs covered the marble floor with their geometric designs. The white curtains hid the mosaic of the Virgin and Christ. Scaffolding concealed crosses and other Christian symbols.
Images broadcast around the world last week captured some of these surprising changes at Hagia Sophia, the Byzantine cathedral in Istanbul, which served as a mosque under Ottoman rule before becoming a museum in 1934. By order of the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, now once again used as a mosque.
But for a group of academics, scientists, and musicians, the re-claiming of Hagia Sophia as a Muslim place of worship threatens to cover up a less tangible treasure: its sound. Bissera Pentcheva, an art historian at Stanford University and an expert in the burgeoning field of acoustic archeology, has spent the past decade studying the building’s flamboyant and reverberating acoustics to reconstruct the sonic world of Byzantine cathedral music. Ms Pentcheva argues that the mystical brilliance of Hagia Sophia is fully revealed only if it is seen as a vessel for animated light and sound.
“The void is a stage,” he said in a recent interview about Zoom.
Conducting research within this disputed monument has required a mix of diplomacy, ingenuity, and technology. Turkish authorities forbade singing within Hagia Sophia, even when it functioned as a museum. Now that the building falls under the jurisdiction of religious authorities, that ban will be tightened, and further investigation may be even more difficult.
But Ms. Pentcheva’s existing work culminated last fall with the release of “The Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia”, an album that brings to life the mysterious mystery of the Byzantine cathedral liturgy, bathed in the brilliant acoustics of space for the one that was written. even though it was recorded in a studio in California.
For approximately 20 years, it has been possible to superimpose the acoustics of a particular space on recorded music during post-production. A pioneer was Altiverb, plug-in software that relies on a large library of virtual spaces so that a recorded track can be adapted to look like it was made, for example, in the Berlin Philharmonic or the King’s Chamber within the Great Pyramid of Giza
But in what’s known as virtual live acoustics, the processors and speakers provide acoustic feedback for a particular space in real time, so musicians can adjust their performance as if they were actually in another building.
Jonathan Abel, a consulting professor at the Stanford Center for Computer Science and Music Research, devised a plan with Ms. Bissera that allowed him to capture vital information about Hagia Sophia’s acoustic properties with the help of a balloon and recording equipment discreet. and a cooperative security guard.
In the winter of 2010, Ms. Pentcheva obtained permission to enter what was then a museum at dawn, when Istanbul was silent. She persuaded a guard to stand in a place that had been occupied by singers during the Byzantine era and to explode a balloon. Meanwhile, she parked where a privileged member of the public could have experienced a mass. The microphones captured the explosion of sound and the consequent washing of reverberations.
Ms. Pentcheva was allowed to capture only four of these pops in two visits. But those bursts of sound produced a large amount of data.
“That little pop-up balloon brings back all the information about the material and the size of the space,” said Abel. “You can think of a human voice as being made up of a bunch of balloon pops. Each voice drags behind him a bunch of impulsive responses, like streamers behind a wedding car.
The sounds from the globe, along with the maps inside, allowed Mr. Abel to identify what he called the building’s acoustic footprint, including the multidirectional refraction of sound when it bounces off the dome and marble columns. The simulation of his computer was integrated into a set of microphones and speakers.
Thus, the members of Cappella Romana, a vocal ensemble based in Portland, Oregon, specializing in Byzantine singing, recorded “The Lost Voices” in a space that persuasively mimicked the acoustics of Hagia Sophia, with its delightful reverberation, crossover echoes and amplification. of particular frequencies
Alexander Lingas, musicologist and music director at Cappella Romana, said the live virtual acoustics were transformative for his understanding of the group’s repertoire. The long reverberation time dictated slower tempos. The drone-singing basses made subtle pitch adjustments to match the maximum resonance frequencies.
Mr. Lingas said that some pieces only “made sense” within the simulated acoustics. An example featured on the album is a cherubic hymn that compares singers to angels.
“Music is designed to convey that,” said Lingas. “But I remember editing this piece and thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is really weird.'” However, he added, as the group rehearsed it with virtual acoustics, a pattern of repeated rippling motifs built up a rippling momentum until, as he described it, “the sound essentially took off.”
Mrs. Pentcheva believed that in the chant of the Byzantine cathedral, reverberation was key to invoking the divine presence. She pointed to the lush amount of melisma in the repertoire, where a single syllable is spread over multiple notes. In Hagia Sophia’s liquid acoustics, words sung in this way blur, the way a line drawn with ink bleeds on wet paper.
“Instead of containing this stain of semantics, the music itself intensifies it,” Pentcheva said. “So there is this process of alienation and distancing from the record of human language that occurs in Hagia Sophia, and it is a desired goal.”
In Greek Orthodox rites, Ms. Pentcheva argued that acoustics and singing interact in a way that “is not about transmitting information, but about an experience that precipitates sound.” It is a totally corporeal investment ”.
The recording gives an idea of that experience. The phrases sung in unison leave a ghostly mark. The rhythmic tremors and grace notes unleashed gushing echoes. The chords unfold in reverberant bloom.
Hagia Sophia’s acoustic drama would have unfolded along with the changing light and curling smoke of the incense, enveloping the senses. The effect is described in a description of the 6th century building by Paul the Silentiary, an aristocrat and poet at Justinian’s court.
“It speaks of human action bringing the divine reaction, the divine voice, into presence,” Pentcheva said. “In a sense, that’s the reverberation of space: after the human voice stops singing, the building continues.”
