Antonopoulos interviewed by Red Bull Music Academy on Medieval Acoustics

Byzantine chant finds a unique bedfellow in a recent discussion featured on the blog of Red Bull Music Academy. In the interview, Psaltikon Artistic Director, Dr. Spiro Antonopoulos, describes his work in medieval acoustics in Thessaloniki, and how his research team and a group of cantors from the same city were able to map subjective acoustical experiences to measurements – such as reverberation across the range of audible frequencies, early decay time, and so forth. This approach is presented next to that of early music specialist and composer Laura Cannell, whose work includes improvising in a church locally known as the Cathedral of the Marshes. Cannell, who improvises powerful new music out of medieval fragments, is described as using old churches as recording studio, amplifier and mixing desk. “I let the space create the music,” says Cannell. Antonopoulos, whose expertise includes transcribing medieval chants from Greek manuscripts dating to the late medieval period, arrives at a similar conclusion, remarking that “we know there is a relationship between the architecture of the spaces and the music that was created to be sung in them.”