Body and Sound
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Alberto Maria Gatti
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This article investigates sound perception through disorientation, understood as a productive mismatch between perceptual expectation and sensory evidence. Drawing on a tripartite model of listening (source–cause–effect), it focuses on situations in which the cause of a sound is visually absent while the source remains visible, destabilizing everyday assumptions about objects, gestures, and sonic outcomes. The research develops resonant objects: solid bodies (glass, wood, metal, furniture) activated by vibrating transducers (exciters) that function as cone-less loudspeakers. In these hybrid devices, timbre is shaped by the object’s material and form, while the emitted sound may be extraneous to the object’s ordinary identity, producing a sonic-visual tension that is neither purely acousmatic nor conventionally performative.
Through a series of compositional experiments, ranging from immersive environments to staged settings, the article examines how proximity, touch, and spatial arrangement intensify the audience’s need to “verify” the sounding body, amplifying perceptual instability. Disorientation is proposed as a compositional method for designing audiovisual stimuli that betray routine expectations, enabling transdisciplinary applications across installation, performance, and theatre.
