Architecture is often referred to as frozen music, but with a little digital technology, artist Blake Carrington has learned to capture the “diverse rhythms, drones and textures” from the stone walls of cathedrals. In his aural performances called Cathedral Scan, Carrington uses a church’s floor plan combined with the space’s unique acoustics to create to generate his his unique architectural sounds. Here’s more from the artist:

Groups of scanners filling the sonic spectrum may act in synch, forming a single harmonically-dense rhythm, or they may scan the plans at different speeds, resulting in complex polyrhythms. Each plan is treated as a modular score, with a distinct rhythm and timbre of its own. Also, by varying the speed and intensity of each scanning group, drone-like sounds may emerge based on the “resonant frequency” of the black and white plan.

This Thursday, March 3, Carrington will reveal the hidden sound of New York’s Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral for a CD release concert. He will be joined by audiovisual artists Mark Cetilia (of Mem1) and Kamran Sadeghi. More information on the AN events diary. (Via BldgBlog.)

The video below captures the digital output of Cathedral Scan without the reverberations and echoes unique to each space, but the live event sounds like it could be quite a spiritual experience.