2014, 3rd order Ambisonics
2016, new version, 5th order Ambisonics
Hagia Sophia in Istambul, Turkey, was once a cathedral, a mosque and is now a secular museum. Its main dome rises up to a height of 182 ft and the building is one of the greatest surviving examples of Byzantine architecture. The Icons of Sound group at CCRMA, Stanford University and the Arts and Art History Department at Stanford sought to recreate its acoustics digitally so that music created centuries ago for that space could be "heard" again as intended (at least virtually). The culmination of the project was a Stanford Live concert in the 2013 opening season of the Bing Concert Hall at Stanford ("From Constantinople to California"), in which the Cappella Romana singers, a group specializing in byzantine chanting, performed live within a computer simulated 3D rendering of the Hagia Sophia acoustics, inside Bing itself.
This recreation of Hagia Sophia remains frozen in the digital domain, and was the foundation and inspiration for the creation of this piece over a week of very intense work in the ZKM Kubus. It was also the testing ground of a new reverberation architecture that enabled me to work completely in the Ambisonics domain, creating soundfields that are independent of the number and location of the rendering speakers. This 3D environment created a natural and very convincing recreation of this very large space, in which the reverberation supports and maintains the spatial information of the music rendered within it.
The interplay between the secular and sacred aspects of Hagia Sophia, and the precise tailoring of percussion and vocal sounds into musical form inside the simulated space created the rest.
The piece was rendered in full 3rd order Ambisonics using Free, Open Source software running in a Linux laptop, and was completely written in Scheme, using Bill Schottstaedt's CLM (Common Lisp Music) and its s7 Scheme interpreter. The simulation of the acoustic environment was created in Ardour with various plugins. In 2016 the piece was further tuned and re-rendered in 5th order Ambisonics.
Composer, performer, lecturer and computer systems administrator at CCRMA, Stanford University
El Dinosaurio
Applesauce Modular Mark V
Planet CCRMA
Of Dinosaurs and Other Creatures
The Well Modulated Dinosaur
The Love Songs of Flying Dinosaurs
El PianoSaurio
Dinosaur He[a]rd!
Wings
Resurrections
Pia[NOT] Etude
The Miraculous Multiplication of Strings
Y SonĂ³ Como Arpa Vieja
Un Esqueleto en la Cocina
The Hidden and Mysterious Machinery of Sound
Modulate me, please?
Space, S[acred|ecular]
Vox Voxel
Toast and Jam
Divertimento de Cocina
Velvet Skin, Heart of Steel
Fugue 1 (Fanfare)
Jurassic Modulations
Earth Songs
Dinosaur Skin
A Very Fractal Cat, Somewhat T[h]rilled
65 Second Bycicle
The Dinosaur At War
Exit Variations
El Dinosaurio Habla
Kitchen <-> Miniature(s)
Instant Knoll
iICEsCcRrEeAaMm
House of Mirrors
With Room to Grow
Knock knock, anybody there?
Three Dreams
Espresso Machine II
Hot'n Cold
Quest
(C)1993-2023 Fernando Lopez-Lezcano. All Rights Reserved.