I am still totally spellbound by the adhan (call to prayer) of the muezzin I heard on Friday (example sound file). We spent the long weekend in Istanbul at this small & cosy hotel situated in the Sultanahmet district in the center. On the fourth floor they have a terrace overlooking the Sea of Marmara. The view is phantastic. In the morning one can see lots of fishing boats. At noon they make way for the tourist boats. On the other side of the sea is Asia. Sometimes the hills over there are visible. When we had our nightcap there at a quarter past nine - I drank an Efes, Catherine a raki - the night had already fallen. Suddenly the muezzin from the blue mosque which is about 100 meters distant started his adhan. "Allah ekbar" etc. It was ear-shatteringly loud and a second and third muezzin from the other two mosques nearby joined in. Their calls where interfering with each other and this created an even more haunting and hallucinating effect than usual. While they were not exactly singing - it was more of a chant - there was a lamenting quality to their voices, a singsong going up and down, as if they were improvising on their given text by varying it in tone and speed. I didn't have the impression playback was used as usually the recorded muezzin calls sound awful but who knows maybe the recording and playback technique has significantly improved in the last 20 years. The last time I heard a muezzin was in 1984, also in Turkey.