We Magnify Thee

H/T: The Crescat

I liked this quite a lot. The most noticeable aspect to many of Byzantine chant is the ison." Here is a summary from the Divine Music Project:

The qualitative differences between Western and Byzantine music are many. The primary difference is that Western music is for the most part polyphonic (i.e., harmonized), whereas Byzantine music is monophonic, constructed of melody alone. This melody is accompanied only by a bass drone, or "ison," which enriches the chant by adding solemnity and power to it. Thus, even when many people chant together, the resulting sound seems to be coming "from one mouth," as St. John Chrysostom described the music of the fourth century. This simple combination of melody and ison is a practice that has been in use for centuries. Adding harmony to monophonic melodies is foreign to traditional liturgical music, even if in recent centuries some Orthodox churches have chosen to adopt elements either of Western-style polyphony or of indigenous folk music.

While the ison is considered rather ubiquitous in Eastern Churches today some do not make use of this feature at all - namely prostopinije. I should note that since the 1970s some groups that sing Carpathian Plainchant have inserted this feature either for performance reasons or out of ignorance. Here is a description from the Metropolitan Cantor Institute:

Prostopinije (Slav. prostopinije, "simple chant") is the traditional liturgical chant of the Rusyn peoples of the Carpathian Mountains, and of their descendants who immigrated to other parts of the world. This chant is sung in the monasteries and parishes of the Byzantine (Ruthenian) Catholic Church and the Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Church in the United States, and in the Ruthenian Catholic dioceses of Mukačevo (Ukraine), Prešov and Kosice (Slovakia), Hajdudorog (Hungary), Krisevtsi (Croatia), and Ruski Kerestur (Serbia) in Europe.