In recent decades, churches and other spaces left over from Istanbul’s multi-confessional and multi-ethnic past have grown increasingly popular as concert venues for performances of Western classical music favored among Istanbul secularists. The popularity of this alternative acoustic infrastructure is often attributed to the ostensibly appropriate atmosphere and “good” acoustics of such spaces. Taking up Istanbul discourses of acoustics and atmosphere as novel sites of ethnographic inquiry, in this article I ask: What is the relationship between atmosphere and acoustics? Which modes of perception are afforded by good acoustics in Istanbul? What makes them good? What is the relationship between these discourses and acoustic spaces linked to non-Turkish and non-Muslim communities? I examine how acoustics in this context is less an objective, technical discourse of material and spatial qualities enabling clear aural perception, than a local discursive concept anchored by the multi-sensory affordances of certain spaces – in particular, Levantine churches in Istanbul’s staunchly secularist Kadıköy district. I demonstrate that good acoustics in this case are emergent from sonic atmospheres in which tuned bodies and spaces from Istanbul’s non-Muslim past are brought into dynamic relation. In this way, sonic atmosphere becomes a particularly clear instance of heritage as cultural process through which Europe comes to be felt, and attributions of good acoustics become a demotic discursive concept for referring to and evaluating that “feel.” I thus provincialize acoustics by elucidating the way in which it is not a universal concept of (social) scientific analysis but rather a local and colloquial, demotic concept for discussing how Europe comes to be felt in particular Istanbul spaces.