Acoustic Mapping as a Compositional Method for Site-Specific Sound Art
Abstract
This thesis introduces Sonic Planimetry, a methodology that transforms the systematic acoustic measurement of architectural interiors from an analytical apparatus into a generative instrument for site-specific musical composition.
Architectural acoustics has, since Sabine, measured rooms in order to correct, predict or optimise them; site-specific sound art has long composed with the acoustic character of place, but without a systematic method for doing so. Between these traditions lies a recognised but unoccupied intersection.
Sonic Planimetry occupies it through a four-phase protocol — planimetric and perceptual mapping, acoustic measurement and computational analysis, cultural-historical contextualisation, and compositional translation — that synthesises its data onto a single architectural drawing functioning as a spatial score.
Its central innovation is a formal frequency-to-pitch translation step that converts measured resonances (in Hz) into tempered pitches with cents deviation, classified as resonant, attenuated or cancelled, rendering acoustic measurement directly operable as musical material.
The methodology is evidenced by a compositional portfolio of four commissioned works — Limen (Maranola, 2023), Echoes of Lost Places #1 and #2 (Simeri, 2025), Custodians (Copped Hall, 2025), and Avantgarde Madrigale (Bagatti Valsecchi, 2026) — produced across architectural and acoustic conditions of deliberately expanding complexity, from a single reverberant room to a thirty-six-position house-museum itinerary.
These works are not illustrations of the method but its research outcomes. The thesis consolidates the practice in a phenomenological-acoustic model that names architecture, event and listener as the three irreducible poles of site-specific sonic work, and embodies the method in an interactive web application through which other practitioners can apply the protocol to sites of their own.
Conducted as practice-as-research, the thesis demonstrates that acoustic measurement can be authored with rather than corrected for, and that doing so is at once procedurally transferable and irreducibly site-specific.
Publications and Research Outputs
Principal non-textual output of the doctoral research: an interactive application embodying the four-phase protocol, from acoustic mapping to frequency-to-pitch translation, making the methodology transferable to practitioners who are neither acousticians nor programmers.
Open the web application ↗Journal article submitted to Organised Sound (Cambridge University Press), call “The Art and Craft in Electroacoustic Music”.
Long paper and peer-reviewed book chapter in Advances in Design, Music and Arts IV (EIMAD 2026), Springer Series in Design and Innovation, Scopus-indexed. Also presented as a conference paper at EIMAD 2026.
Article in the SPaMEC 2026 special issue of Quaderni del San Pietro a Majella (with ISBN).
Conference presentation and published abstract, EUROMUSE International Scientific Conference, Belgrade.