Pop Goes the Chorus, Sounds From the Hagia Sophia
Pop Goes the Chorus, Sounds From the Hagia Sophia
By: a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads - Art and Other Odd Adventures
I just read the coolest thing about the Hagia Sophia.
For some background: the Hagia Sophia, Greek for Holy Wisdom, was completed in 537 CE in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) during the reign of Justinian I. It was an engineering marvel of its time, crowned by a massive central dome rising more than fifty-five meters and spanning roughly thirty meters. Although the dome and structure have endured multiple collapses and repairs over the centuries, the building remains remarkably faithful to its original design and is widely considered one of the finest achievements of Byzantine architecture.
From its dedication on December 27, 537, until the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, the Hagia Sophia served as a Christian cathedral, primarily an Orthodox one. After the city’s capture, the building was looted and then converted into a mosque—a role it retained until 1935, when it was designated a museum. In recent years, there has been a movement, supported by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to restore the building to its former mosque status. Because the Hagia Sophia is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, such changes exist within a complex international and cultural conversation.
But what captivated me most isn’t politics or architecture, it’s sound.
The dome of the Hagia Sophia produces extraordinary acoustics. During the nearly nine centuries it served as a Christian cathedral, thousands of sacred choral works were composed specifically for its reverberant space. Chant and harmony were shaped by the way sound moved beneath that vast dome.
The problem is that no one truly knew what that music sounded like in situ. After 1453, the building fell silent. Islamic practice does not include sung choral music in mosques, and over time, the sonic memory of the space vanished.
Recently, that silence has been challenged, ingeniously.
Art historian Bissera Pentcheva and computer music specialist Jonathan Abel, both at Stanford University, collaborated on a project to resurrect the sound of the Hagia Sophia. Pentcheva traveled to the building and spent five days recording an unlikely source of data: balloons popping inside the cathedral.
The balloons were key. The sharp, instantaneous burst of a pop captures how sound reflects and decays in a space, essentially creating an acoustic fingerprint. Abel then used those recordings to build a digital model that could adapt music to the Hagia Sophia’s unique reverberation.
The result is astonishing. Through modern technology, the chants of Cappella Romana, a group specializing in early Christian music, can now be heard as if they were sung beneath the great dome itself.
After nearly six hundred years, the Hagia Sophia sings again.
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About the Author
a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller traveling through life
She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.
You can also browse her online photography gallery at shop.takethebackroads.com.
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