Really beautiful, glad I took the few minutes to listen.
Couldn't agree more. For those who listened, Capella Romana's "The Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia" is also available on Spotify. It's amazing.
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The sound of the Hagia Sophia, more than 500 years ago
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Re: The sound of the Hagia Sophia, more than 500 years ago
#22Any links or ideas on what it would sound like during the Ottoman Era? It was the primary mosque of the empire for centuries, so I’d imagine there had to be some form of singing or chanting (Sufis, maybe?)
Re: The sound of the Hagia Sophia, more than 500 years ago
#23Truly magical!
Re: The sound of the Hagia Sophia, more than 500 years ago
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Hagia Sophia was the site of a significant massacre when it was forcibly converted from a church to a mosque.
Unless the blood from that massacre changed the acoustics of the space, it's still not enormously relevant to the article.
Eh, I will kind of buy that. It was a church before it was a mosque and churches tend to have quite a bit more music than mosques.
The race war comment above seemed uncharitable.
Re: The sound of the Hagia Sophia, more than 500 years ago
#25Really beautiful, glad I took the few minutes to listen.
You might like to listen to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_chant
Re: The sound of the Hagia Sophia, more than 500 years ago
#26Beautifully done, especially the transition from the studio to the simulated environment.
You can hear similar choral music if you visit an Orthodox Church or monastery, specifically a Greek or Georgian one maybe.
Re: The sound of the Hagia Sophia, more than 500 years ago
#27Digital reverb algorithms are a huge and interesting area. One can recreate the acoustics of a venue from recordings of a balloon pop or a pistol shot. One can also create physically impossible reverbs, where the echoes precede the actual sound or get louder instead of fading.
Could you point me to more info/examples on physically impossible reverbs?
The "Unnatural" section here covers a few varieties of unnatural reverb effect [0]. (I'd also recommend many of the items with the "theory" tag on this blog)
In addition to those, reverbs that modulate the pitch signal are very common in music, but are physically impossible on a large scale. Most are subtle and create a detuned "thickening" sort of sound. Some will change the pitch by a whole octave or more. [1]
Artificial reverbs can also have their decay rates adjusted dynamically, and can even decay "negatively" so that the reverb actually grows in volume. Any other parameter could also be adjusted in real-time (depending on the reverb) [2]
[0] https://valhalladsp.com/2018/05/14/effect-o-pedia-reverb-typ...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlwdmxuBuyM "The Black Keys-The Go Getter"
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJDW9l2cw0I&t=60s Make Noise Erbe Verb reverb module
Re: The sound of the Hagia Sophia, more than 500 years ago
#28This was beautiful to listen to. By pure luck (should have done more reading), I was visiting Pisa in Italy. There's a building (the baptistry) _beside_ the leaning tower, which has the most perfect acoustics.
Every hour, they close the doors and a person sings a series of individual notes which then interact just _beautifully_ in the building. Hard to describe. There's a soundcloud[1] here, not mine, stars properly around 1:23. I think you really have to be there though, it was wonderful.
[1] https://soundcloud.com/miguelisazam/pisa-baptistry-of-st-joh... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pisa_Baptistery
Re: The sound of the Hagia Sophia, more than 500 years ago
#29The next step (that will probably never happen) would be to refurnish the Hagia Sophia, as it would have been before it was plundered in the fourth crusade, and seat an audience in it, as if for a mass. Then pop another balloon. All those extra furnishings and bodies would have had a significant impact on how the space sounded. The plastered over mosaics might also create a noticeable effect that would need to be com…
The last Orthodox church services were in 1453. So I doubt that there will be many critics who remember back that far :)
Re: The sound of the Hagia Sophia, more than 500 years ago
#30I just finished reading "Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West" by Raymond Ibrahim, and it's a devastating account, and an eye popping book, of Islam's spread through Christian lands. 85% of what used to be Christian was conquered by jihad, all of north Africa, all Middle East, all Anatolia, and all the way to Vienna and Spain. Millions died, raped, enslaved, and forcefully converte…
I'm not sure HN is the venue for you to begin your race war or make whatever point you're trying to go for here.
Islam is not a race.
The comment you're responding to (which is flagged and dead) doesn't belong on HN, but unless you've invented some genetic basis to tell apart Anatolian Turks and Greeks (good luck with that) try to be more precise about what irks you.
This kind of dismissal makes things worse.