Turgut Ercetin & Jonathan S. Abel, "Exploring the Acoustics of Hagia Sophia"

Date
Fri November 20th 2015, 4:00 - 6:00pm
Event Sponsor
Humanities Center,
CCRMA,
Department of Art & Art History,
Department of English,
Icons of Sound
Location
Humanities Center Board Room
Turgut Ercetin & Jonathan S. Abel, "Exploring the Acoustics of Hagia Sophia"

Hagia Sophia's reverberant acoustics were integral to the experience of services in the Great Church.  Based on impulse response measurements that we obtained in two campaigns in December, 2014 and one in January, 2015, we explore the character of this building's soundfield and fine-tune the process, known as auralization, in which we digitally imprint Hagia Sophia's acoustics on live chant.  Whereas previous studies reported temporal and spectral features of measurements collected in the nave, in our work we concentrate on the spatial character of the soundfield by gathering directional impulse responses from both the nave and narthex.  In this paper, we describe differences in acoustic character between the narthex and nave, and discuss specific psychoacoustic roles played by the different spatial units, focusing on the dome and colonnades in the nave.

Turgut Ercetin recently completed his doctoral degree at Stanford where he studied composition with Brian Ferneyhough as his advisor and computer music with Chris Chafe. Ercetin’s works engage with issues of sound, not as sonic colors, but as concepts that are perceived at various degrees of complexity resulting from composed acoustics. Most of his research and work, therefore, is involved with psychoacoustics as well as computer-aided compositional processes. His solo, chamber and electro-acoustic works have been performed throughout the United States and Europe.

Jonathan S. Abel is a Consulting Professor at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) in the Music Department at Stanford University, working in music and audio applications of signal and array processing, parameter estimation and acoustics. He was a Co–Founder and Chief Technology Officer of the GRAMMY Award-winning Universal Audio, Inc., a researcher at NASA/Ames Research Center, Chief Scientist at Crystal River Engineering, Inc., and a lecturer in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Yale University.  He holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from Stanford University and an S.B. from MIT, all in electrical engineering. He is a Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society for contributions to audio effects processing.