Acoustics of Hagia Sophia at the Ritz Carlton San Francisco


Hagia Sophia Cappella Romana & CCRMA
Hagia Sophia: Cappella Romana & CCRMA

Cappella Romana is one of the featured artists to perform at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in San Francisco, in a gala on September 27 to raise funds for the Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox Institute at Berkeley.

The team from Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) will be providing virtual acoustics for the event, transforming a hotel ballroom into the acoustical environment of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople/Istanbul. Cappella Romana will perform Byzantine chants that were sung in Hagia Sophia just prior to the Fall of Constantinople.

CCRMA will also synthesize the acoustics of Holy Cross Orthodox Church in Belmont, California for a presentation of Greek-American choral music by Tikey Zes, one of the honorees at the event.

CCRMA, Stanford’s Department of Art & Art History, and Cappella Romana, led by Drs. Jonathan Abel, Bissera Pentcheva, and Alexander Lingas, are each partners in a collaborative project called “Icons of Sound,” which recently featured a performance of medieval chant from Hagia Sophia presented in Stanford’s Bing Hall.