Why Is There Water Dripping down My Face? A Night at Pop-Up Magazine.

“my whole body shivered and the tears started up.”

Still, it wasn’t just the sad stories that triggered crying. Sam Harnett brought along the Cappella Romana choir, a vocal ensemble based in Portland that sings ancient religious chants. The singers were brilliant on their own, but then Harnett told us about this new technology that mimics the acoustics of the Hagia Sofia, and when the choir chanted with this audio effect, my whole body shivered and the tears started up. … During the Cappella Romana choir, as voices reverberated across every surface and light filtered through the smoke behind the singers (really, they brought a smoke machine), I looked around and saw many cheeks that were glistening. I wasn’t alone. It was everywhere, these tears, so I decided to stopped trying to hide it, and just listen.
—Katie Herzog, The Stranger

UPDATE – Experience this for yourself on our new recording Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia!

Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia is the first vocal album in the world to be recorded entirely in live virtual acoustics. It brings together art history, music history, performance, and technology to re-create medieval sacred sound in the cathedral of Hagia Sophia as an aural virtual reality.

With a stunning reverberation time of over 11 seconds, the acoustics of Hagia Sophia were measured and analyzed, and auralized in real-time on Cappella Romana’s performance by the Icons of Sound team at Stanford University (iconsofsound.stanford.edu).

Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia presents more than 75 minutes of medieval Byzantine chant for the Feast of the Holy Cross in Constantinople, one of the greatest celebrations in the yearly cycle of worship at Hagia Sophia. This deluxe package (CD and Blu-rayTM) contains standard- and high-resolution stereo and surround-sound formats including Dolby Atmos™, as well as a bonus track and a 24-minute documentary film.