STRATA
A single cut through the ground of Istanbul: every historical layer sounds from the first second, separated only by height. Tuned to a pitch set measured from the call to prayer in Hagia Sophia — which is never heard.
- 2026
- Electroacoustic
- Fixed media, 5th-order ambisonic (ambiX ACN/SN3D), 36 channels
- 7:30
I grew up in Istanbul, and you do not hear a city’s history one era at a time. It all arrives together: a call to prayer, a ferry, gulls, a market — different centuries inside the same second.
STRATA is laid out as a single cut through the ground: a trench face, not a story. Its horizontal axis follows a walk I have made many times, from Fener along the Golden Horn through Eminönü and Karaköy, up through the funicular tunnel bored into the hill in 1875, out at Beyoğlu. Its vertical axis is depth in time. Every layer sounds from the first second, separated only by height, because nothing has to come first.
No real section is clean. The layers fold. A fault cuts through and displaces everything at once, without explanation. An unconformity opens where the record is simply missing. And once the bedding overturns — the oldest material passes overhead while the surface sinks underfoot, and the map you have spent five minutes learning is taken away.
Every sound in the piece is tuned to a pitch set measured from a recording of the call to prayer in Hagia Sophia: four degrees, including an upper neighbour at +124 cents, which is neither a tempered semitone nor a whole tone. The adhan is never heard. It is the tuning of everything else.
Almost nothing moves, because layers do not. The gulls do. They are the only sound in this city with no history — a gull in 1453 sounded like a gull now — so they are the only thing allowed to fly through all of it, and they are what is left at the end, untouched, high above you.
Technical note
Composed, spatialised and mastered in 2026 with the Composers Desktop Project, Ableton Live and Python. The master is 5th-order ambiX (ACN/SN3D, full 3D), 36 channels. The binaural version is decoded from that same master through a Magnitude Least Squares decoder built from a measured KU100 dummy-head dataset.
First piece of Strata, an album on the sonic archaeologies.
For the multichannel master, the technical notes, or a decode matched to your own loudspeaker layout, please get in touch.