ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author remembers coming into what is known as The Angel Choir. The Angel Choir is appropriate as a title; completed in 1280, it is named for the twenty-eight carved angels that adorn it. The walls gave it back, pouring it down and around us as we remained transfixed, surrounded by visible and invisible angels. Aural architecture emphasises sound primarily as illumination, whereas a soundscape emphasises sound in itself. While Blesser and Salter are correct, the author might underlines that the ever-present ambience within the room provides the common denominator of a subtle sound bed for all other sonic events that occur within it. Architecture is multi-sensory, and a sound from human source becomes transformed, and one might say ‘owned’, by an acoustic, a transitory part of the very building itself. The vast interior volume and reflective materials of Hagia Sophia produce reverberant acoustics, enabling a single note exhaled in space to last more than ten seconds.
