LB, 1994
This media architecture studio, still in formation, brings the sonic gardens of Giardino Sonoro, the sensing spaces of MUSST and the audiovisual research of Lorenzo Brusci into a single practice, so that technology may be integrated into life from the landscape to the daily routine.
Form
Building
Click an empty cell to place the chosen form, and click a form to take it down.
The facade is read from left to right as one bar of sixteen steps, and each floor is a register, so that a square volume strikes as a kick, a column as a snare, a slab sustains a bass line for four steps, a triangular roof ratchets into hats and a cylinder rings as a bell, the pitch of every voice depending on the floor on which it stands.
Left to itself the building grows and loses forms over a cycle of twenty-four bars, and the music thickens and thins with it, so that composing and decomposing are one and the same gesture; the forms float, as they do in Malevich, because gravity is a constraint of construction and not of composition, and any visitor may interrupt the cycle at any cell.
Technology has never stood outside life, for a garden, a loudspeaker set into a stone wall and a score are equally artifices through which a place learns to answer those who dwell in it, and the studio accordingly treats landscape, architecture and daily living as a single continuous medium, in which sound, light, sensing and computation count as materials with the same legitimacy as soil, timber and water.
What we call living automation is the next step of that old alliance, provided that automation is understood less as the delegation of chores than as a finer instrument returned to the inhabitant, so that a home, a courtyard or a street may attend to the weather, the hour and the mood of the people crossing it without ever imposing one way of listening or one way of living.
To be super, in this sense, asks for nothing more spectacular than to make art of one's own life, which is natural precisely because it is artificial, as the line above has been saying since 1994.
A sound, technology and experience design studio, active since 2013, devoted to sensing spaces, intelligent objects and immersive design, with a body of work in adaptive and virtual acoustics, noise masking, sound modules and generative music, all inspired by what its own pages call a digital humanism.
Sound immersive experiences in natural habitats, where a sonic garden lets wind, humidity and rain take part in the composition, and where each loudspeaker, being a perceptual mediator, is placed so as to exist in time together with plants and stone instead of imposing a single stage on the listener.
The personal research of Lorenzo Brusci in sound and image, shared in public on Instagram, which gives the studio an experimental practice of its own, so that the commissioned work and the open research may go on contaminating one another.
The history is drawn as a map and not as a list, since the work never developed along a single line and accumulated instead in seven parallel lanes that keep exchanging materials, so that a collective founded in 1993 to compose nonlinear music for theatre and dance becomes a garden team in 2004, a studio of sound modules and sensing spaces between Kraków and Berlin a few years later, and a laboratory of generative music from 2015, while the albums go on appearing in the one lane that has never stopped.
Squares mark foundations, circles works, triangles events and bars periods; the colour belongs to the lane, an open circle means a year that the sources allow only to estimate, and any form can be selected to read its story and to follow its links. The time scale is not uniform, since the years before 1990 are compressed and those since 2020 are drawn wider, because most of the albums fall there. The map can be dragged, scrolled, or crossed with the arrow keys.
Lanes
Go to
The map starts in 1966 and compresses the years before 1990, which are mostly a matter of ground, so that the years since 1993 can be read in detail; the years since 2020 are drawn wider to make room for the albums.
The writing runs alongside the sound practice and not after it, since the questions that a sonic garden or a generative drummer raise, namely who answers for an environment that composes itself and what becomes of agency once it is delegated to a circuit, are the questions that the essays pursue, in the vocabulary of a philosopher of music trained in Florence and Siena who has gone on coining the terms he needs, from synthetic cycles to Handmade AI.
The essays are published on Substack, in Italian and in English, and the list below follows them together with a few related texts.
Reframes ethics as the depth of implicated simulation, that is, of exposure to consequences, and not as the depth of simulation alone; the exposure criterion, the reversibility of dissolution, sampling sensibility and Handmade AI are its working concepts. Published as a bilingual document.
Reads human laziness as an evolutionary driver and as a biological imperative of cognitive homeostasis, which offloads memory, calculation and symbolic orientation onto the environment, so that hominisation appears as the construction of exosomatic prostheses, the synthetic cycles; the ethical fault line that opens is the question of who answers for reality once agency is delocalised.
Argues that the use of an archive, and not its preservation, is the political act, with a fact-checked account of the 1994 rescue of the de Martino archive and of the 1999 Timet project Restituzioni, which links the essay to the album of that name on the map above.
Strategies and opportunities for the fashion industry, built on a shoemaking use case, on the Recursive Knowledge Transfer Framework and on a reading of Popper and Luhmann.
A pamphlet in nine theses, with an appendix and a bibliography, accompanied by a response to the debate on brain rot.
A dialogue in five chapters in which several AI models are fused into the single voice of a “Bot”, moving through Peircean abduction, a Spinozan correction of Hegel and the included third of Lupasco and Nicolescu.
A flagship essay on the semiotics of AI, structured around the archive, the list and abduction.
An essay on sonic gardens and immersive spaces, which is the philosophical counterpart of the work of Giardino Sonoro.
The portfolio of Giardino Sonoro provides the first body of work, from the courtyards and lemon houses of Florence to the Biennale Musica of Venice and the nights of Paris and Madrid.
The team of the sonic garden gathered about twenty artists from all over the world, among them Frank Shulte, Paolo Fiumi, Letizia Renzini, Lorenzo Piggici, Davide Tidoni, Matteo Milani, the Mariposa band, Enrico Gabrielli, Alessandro Fiori and Enzo Cimino, and worked with architects such as Andrea Sensoli and Claudio Nardi, with the art critic Lara Vinca Masini and with the media designer Pietro Fantoni.
The sonic garden experience was brought to a clinical and therapeutic level at ALISé, a rehabilitation centre in Scandicci, in 2005 and 2006. The installation is still working and provides interactive soundscapes, made with MaxMSP, only for special therapeutic experiences.
The noise-masking experiments began in 2003 with Giovanni Conti, a young media designer very skilled in Max/MSP, and have continued to the present, so that private gardens in the Middle East and in Europe can now use the IT set-up that routes the musicscape according to a spectral analysis of the environment. Further information cannot be disclosed.
Lorenzo has published on the masking of urban noise with Gaetano Licitra and Mattia Cobianchi, among them the paper Artificial soundscape approach to noise pollution in urban areas and Italian Sonic Gardens, presented in Stockholm in 2010, and with Gianluca Memoli, then of the same environmental agency of Tuscany, ARPAT. The Italian sonic gardens, in which sounds from a music database and from metacompositions are chosen automatically from an analysis of the sound field that microphones capture, are cited in later studies on the augmentation of park soundscapes.
Many sonic garden projects were designed so that the noise of the adjacent streets was masked and attenuated by a complex system of interactive soundscape, music and plant-objects distributed in space, with a virtual microphone array conceived to reach the correct computational efficiency. Borgo I Vicelli is an example of a residential place conceived in this way.
Images and full descriptions at giardinosonoro.com.
A generative engine designed by composers, which works in MIDI rather than flat audio, learns from datasets that composers build by deliberate choice instead of by scraping, and runs on the user's own hardware; its Any2Music portal turns video, image or emotional metadata into structured MIDI, which suggests how a facade or a garden might one day compose with what it sees.
Closed-loop musical neurofeedback in which the music listens to the body and answers back; its biofeedback demo already maps the colour of a landscape onto the spectrum of the sound, an idea of the same family as the building at the top of this page, where a picture and a piece of music are made of the same decisions.
A Florence-based studio for local, open-source and transparent AI, aligned with GDPR and the AI Act, which keeps the intelligence of the studio on premises and legible to those it serves.
The albums gather the compositional practice that precedes and accompanies every architecture of the studio, from the Timet records of the nineties, made of recorded bands, actors and voices, to the metacompositions of recent years, in which classical repertoires, MIDI scores and generative drummers are edited with the freedom of a DJ and the supervision of a philosopher of music.
The whole catalogue lives on Bandcamp and is also distributed on the usual streaming platforms.
Five tracks re-edited and re-composed from material recorded and performed live between 1992 and 1995, remastered and released on Bandcamp.
The player loads from Bandcamp and appears on the live website.
Spotify and Apple Music open the artist pages, while YouTube Music opens a search for the artist.
Born in Zurich in 1955, Andres Bosshard studied musicology and art history, has toured since 1980 as an experimental musician with the trio Nachtluft, and since 1995 has designed sound architectures in public space with landscape planners and architects, work for which he received the Swiss Music Prize for Sound Architecture in 2017. Lorenzo counts him as a close friend and collaborator, and as an inspirer of his own work at the beginning of the sonic garden years, and the inspiration ran in both directions, since Lorenzo brought to Bosshard’s practice the gestural control of simple, dry plug-ins in Nuendo, other musicological input, above all multichannel mixing strategies, and collaborative metacompositional instructions. Bosshard inspired the sonic garden adventure and felt part of it, while the daily work with architects, politicians and clients was led from Florence by Lorenzo; many concerts and projects have been shared since.
Andres Bosshard, German WikipediaBiography, Agosto Foundation
The sounding landmark of the Swiss national exhibition on the Arteplage in Biel, where the shell of one of the three towers designed by Coop Himmelb(l)au became an interactive musical instrument, with a loudspeaker constellation that created a “kaleidophonic” acoustic, a weekly composition that answered the events of its surroundings on seven listening levels, and musicians who changed it live from a capsule that opened like a cocoon. By the account of its sound architect, a team of some eighty musicians and twenty-five commissioned compositions kept it sounding for twenty-two weeks, and Timet took part in it.
A permanent sound garden in the city, in which Stefano Passerotti was the master gardener and Lorenzo Brusci, who gave the venture its name and approach, designed the media and sensory dimension and led the daily work, while Andres Bosshard, who worked in Zurich on quite different projects, took part as an inspiring companion of the adventure; it opened the international sonic garden projects of Giardino Sonoro.
During the ISCM World New Music Days the lookout tower of the Killesberg park was transformed into a sound tower by Andres Bosshard in collaboration with Lorenzo Brusci, one of twelve sound sculptures of a sound park curated by Carsten Seiffarth, with works by Sam Auinger and Bruce Odland, Andreas Oeldorp, Erwin Stache and Bosshard.
Bosshard has taught art and media at the Zurich University of the Arts since 2005, where he leads the Sound Study Group, and Lorenzo has been among its guest lecturers; his later projects include sonicArk, the sound of Aarhus, for the European Capital of Culture in 2017, and the Klanghaus Toggenburg.
For thirty years the sound of the studio has also been written for bodies on a stage, first with Timet, which composed for theatre, television and radio throughout the nineties, and then in a long and still unfinished conversation with the dance of Raffaella Giordano and Giorgio Rossi, whose company Sosta Palmizi has asked for music, for sound design and for editing in turn, with the interactive dance of Ariella Vidach in Milan and, since 2004, with the Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts in Bangalore, so that the composer who now designs gardens and facades has never ceased to be a composer for people who move.
The traces below have been gathered from the public archives of the companies and of the festivals, and they are therefore incomplete, above all for the nineties, for which the production credits are rarely online; the map above places the same works in time.
The work with Raffaella Giordano began in the mid-nineties by using her body as a non-linear score for musicians. Paolo Frasconi then joined, and together they designed a mathematical non-linear score for musicians and dancers, in a method in which metalinguistics and interlinguistics were already on Lorenzo’s radar, awaiting the more advanced autonomous agents that now carry out such transcoding every day.
The biography of Raffaella Giordano records that between 1997 and 1999 she collaborated with contemporary and jazz musicians, Lorenzo Brusci among them, in the years of La Notte trasfigurata and of Quore, which earned her a special UBU prize in 2000, and it does not itemise which works carry his music.
A twelve-minute solo and contribution of Raffaella Giordano to Contemporanea ’01 at the Museo Pecci in Prato, with a voice-over text by Mariangela Gualtieri, light design by Vincent Longuemare and sound elaboration by Lorenzo Brusci / Timet. The piece returned in Milan and Bologna in 2004 and at the Teatro CRT in Milan in December 2009.
A project for eight performers conceived and choreographed by Raffaella Giordano, with lighting by Vincent Longuemare, sets by Stefano Ricci and composition and sound design by Lorenzo Brusci, seen at the Festival RED in Reggio Emilia on 21 June 2002.
Choreographies signed and danced by Rebecca Murgi, Giorgio Rossi and a group of young performers, premiered at Fabbrica Europa in Florence, with music and sound space by Lorenzo Brusci / Timet, a sound-processing system and the DJing of Letizia Renzini.
A solo of and with Raffaella Giordano, freely inspired by the Song of Songs, with sound design and electroacoustic composition by Lorenzo Brusci / Timet, flute by Enrico Gabrielli and additional sound by Jóhann Jóhannsson. It was previewed in August 2005 at the International Dance Encounters in Nairobi and premiered on 13 September 2005 at the UOVO festival in Milan, in co-production with the Officina Atelier Marseillais de Production.
A solo on the universality of nature, which debuted at Autunno Danza in Cagliari in the autumn of 2017, with incipit and piano music by Arturo Annecchino, thoughts by Danio Manfredini and Joëlle Bouvier, and editing and abstract compositions by Lorenzo Brusci. It toured to the Teatro Grande in Brescia on 12 March 2022 and to Arezzo.
Twenty years after its debut Raffaella Giordano entrusts the reconstruction of the solo to the choreographer Stefania Tansini, with sound design and electroacoustic composition by Lorenzo Brusci and additional sound by Jóhann Jóhannsson; the project was produced by Sosta Palmizi with Triennale Milano Teatro and Fuorimargine, previewed on 23 March 2025 at the Teatro Mecenate in Arezzo, and was a finalist for the UBU prize 2025.
Ariella Vidach, a choreographer of Croatian origin who trained in the New York of the eighties, and the video artist Claudio Prati founded the association Avventure in Elicottero Prodotti in Lugano in 1988 and the company Ariella Vidach – AiEP in Milan in 1996, a laboratory of interactive media, sensors and motion capture in dance. Lorenzo Brusci composed for the company between 1995 and 1999, the years of works such as Exp (1996) and Drans (1998), whose individual credits could not be verified online and are left for him to complete.
Between 1996 and 2001 Lorenzo made many productions for RAI Radio 3 with the director Massimo Luconi, together with theatre productions and television documentaries, among them a production with the actor Massimo Popolizio on the poet Eugenio Montale and a project in Capri on Curzio Malaparte’s La Pelle. The titles and dates of these works are not itemised online and are given here as he recalls them.
Timet also composed for theatre with Franco Di Francescantonio, for the Machine de Théâtre and the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, for television on RAI, RAI-SAT and RTSI, which brought the Premio Immagine in 2002, and it made the sound of installations such as Pack Age in Naples in 2001 and of the Klangturm at Expo.02 in Biel. The record Shadows (1998), after T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, belongs to the same theatrical field.
A collaboration with the poet Giancarlo Majorino that Lorenzo defines as fundamental, which lasted from 1996 to 2018 and whose highest fruit is, in his words, the album Carne Capitata, made with, among others, the pianist Stefano Bollani, Ares Tavolazzi, Mirko Guerrini, the singer and actress Monica Demuru, Enrico Fink and Gianluca Gori.
An ongoing project with the photographer Pietro Bologna, in which photographs and videos are sonified, that is, turned into sound.
Productions and collaborations with the composer Bruno De Franceschi, among them live music happenings for piano and electronics.
A collaboration with the centre that Jayachandran Palazhy founded and still directs in Bangalore, and with Jayachandran himself, a friend and collaborator ever since, which began in the years of Giardino Sonoro, after the performance of Timet at the Attakkalari Festival in 2002, and has continued to the present, with master classes at the Attakkalari Biennial among its occasions.
A multidisciplinary performance in a historic building in Panjim that fuses AI-generated music, projection-mapped visuals and contemporary dance, drawing on European and Indian sonic traditions. It was conceived and curated by Jayachandran Palazhy, with technical direction and scenography by Gaurav Singh Nijjer, interactive movement systems by Kunihiko Matsuo, and AI music composition and interactive soundscapes by Lorenzo Brusci, Andrea Marinelli and the MUSI-CO AI ecosystem, and it was produced by the Serendipity Arts Festival and Attakkalari with the Italian Cultural Institute of Mumbai and the Japan Foundation.
A movement workshop and a public lecture-demonstration at the Performing Arts Lab of IIT Bombay, in which Lorenzo Brusci and Jayachandran Palazhy introduce the project and demonstrate RAZAI as the human-AI interaction system developed by Attakkalari and Super AI Studio, with the Italian Cultural Institute of Mumbai and MUSI-CO.
A new collaboration with Attakkalari and other Indian artists on somatic intelligence and on the improvement of postmodern and ultramodern instant communication through the MUSI-CO AI ecosystem and technology integration, after the success of RAZAI, to be promoted through a mission in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore, with a debut planned for about June 2027. The name EMBODIA is temporary.
Marek Chołoniewski, born in Kraków in 1953, studied organ, theory and composition with Bogusław Schaeffer and electronic music with Józef Patkowski, has taught at the Academy of Music since 1976, has directed its Electroacoustic Music Studio since 2000, and founded the Muzyka Centrum society in 1977 and the Audio Art Festival; since 2012 he also leads the Audiosfera Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts. He writes instrumental and electroacoustic music for radio, film and television, and makes sound and video installations and interactive projects. What Lorenzo values most in this work is its commitment to extra-musical intelligences applied to music, and above all to live music.
GrupLab, the art and research group of the studio, descends from the Multimedia Studio opened in 2001, the Intermedium series of 2005 and the Orchestra ElektroNova of 2009, and meets in the numbered sessions called Plejrek. Lorenzo Brusci is among the participants of the documented sessions from Plejrek 66 on 4 January 2017 to Plejrek 162 on 3 April 2019, among them number 98 at Lorenzo Studio on 30 August 2017, number 113 on 7 February 2018 with Francesco Capanni and number 144 on 31 October 2018.
Lorenzo describes his debt towards Marek as deeply situationist, the debt of a composer towards a great meta-music mind, and the Plejrek evenings, in which a studio becomes every few weeks the scene of a collective improvisation, are perhaps the place where that debt is most visible.
Enquiries about gardens, buildings, public spaces, living systems and music can be sent to info@musi-co.com.