Inside the great room at the Sheikh Lotf Allah Mosque, Isfahan, Iran.

“Ali, do you hear me?” my father says.

He’s at least 35 meters away. He's not shouting and he's turned away from me, his face closely tucked in one of the corner of the giant domed hall at the Sheikh Lotf Allah Mosque in Isfahan, Iran.

The light is poor and I can barely see him.

But to hear him? Logic says that should be impossible. Yet, I do hear him—albeit in a low, grated tone. I saw giggling tourists do the same thing in the vestibule at the Ali Qapu Palace, across the Naghsh-i Jahan Square from where we are now.

Then my guide, art historian Abdulreza Soleimani, grabs my shoulders and positions me in the exact center of the 20-by-20 meter room. The breathtaking domed ceiling—bejeweled and sparkling with literally thousands of hand-painted miniature shapes—towers perhaps 30 meters above us.

“Say something, anything.”

“Okay, I’m in Isfahan!” I yell.

I hear myself reverberating through the room. But the resonance is instant. It’s not really an echo. It doesn’t interfere with my speech.

It’s like speaking into “a hundred Bose speakers,” is how my my father puts it.

“This is a component of what they call music of architecture,” Soleimani explains. “It’s the literal kind and it's very common. Iranian architects did this for obvious reasons; to allow for sound amplification technology that didn’t yet exist.

“Another form of music of architecture—the kind that is most often referred to in research—is music that is woven into structures.

“When you listen to Persian music, say the Chahargah, you have a prologue, a beginning and so on. Slowly you are taken to a certain height before you land back down.

“Same with architecture. This morning we walked up the steps of Sheikh Lotf Allah Mosque, then we entered the vestibule and then a hallway that led to another hallway, and so on.

“Then you were facing the walls in the great room, where every tile, every shape has been calculated to raise you to a higher realm. Then other shapes are to take you to even higher planes. Until, of course, you meet the center of the dome, the height of your experience before you are led back down and out the door. Kasrat-beh-vahdat is taking you to meet God.

“This is the music of architecture. The Iranians who designed these structures were not just building buildings. That was the least of their concerns.

“They created an experience, an experience of the heart and the spirit, to worship, to sing praises to the heavens and allow us to experience the same even centuries later.”