In an era in which music is often reduced to a continuous, fragmented stream—consumed rapidly and relegated to mere background noise—Neuf Voix, the artistic identity of composer and sound artist Elvio Seta, moves in the opposite direction. His work brings sound back to the center of experience. His research transcends the boundaries of traditional musical production and becomes a sensitive exploration of the relationship between the individual, space, and perception.In his hands, sound is neither an ornament nor an atmospheric accessory, but rather a medium to be inhabited, an environment through which we can rethink the way that we move, stop, and breathe amidst the spaces that surround us. 

For Neuf Voix, sound is a living material: not something that simply occupies a place, but creates it, changes it, configures it. From this perspective, space cannot ever be neutral: it is a social, cultural, and perceptual construction. Each composition, every performative gesture, becomes an act of spatial production, a form of dialogue between body and environment, between listener and acoustic ecosystem that assumes shape and develops in real time.It is a vision that resonates with thinkers like Lefebvre and de Certeau, for whom space is always the result of practices, paths, and acts of inhabitation.

"I believe that acoustic architecture is not a background that simply hosts music, it is an active force."

— Neuf Voix


His artistic roots grow out of the great avant-garde of the twentieth century—Stockhausen, Nono, Schaeffer, Grisey. From them emerges the tension between rigor and freedom that permeates his entire poetics, a dynamic balance between science and intuition, between structure and living sonic matter. After completing his studies in composition and deepening his work in Germany, after two advanced master’s programs with Enrico Cosimi and a direct encounter with the cutting-edge research of IRCAM in Paris, his music has continued to be guided by a central question: how can sound not only fill a space, but actually construct it?

This question eventually led him to build his own Acusmonium from scratch—a portable, modular acusmatic system designed as both a technical tool and an extension of his artistic thought. It is a means of making spatialization an autonomous, flexible, and accessible language. The idea that sound can be projected and sculpted freely in space has shaped his performances into immersive environments, temporary sonic architectures where the audience is not a passive assembly of listeners, but a collective body participating in the unfolding of the experience.

Often situated in locations with distinctive acoustic and architectural features, these performances become ephemeral communities. Within them, the boundary between creator and listener dissolves, vibrations converse with the structures that contain them, and music becomes a way of redefining the relationship between body, place, and perception. It is a contemporary form of rituality, one that restores depth to listening and presence to the body in a world dominated by visual saturation and constant distraction. 

"The decision to build my own Acusmonium comes from a very concrete but also conceptual need."

— Neuf Voix

This trajectory finds its most mature expression in Music for Dimensions, a project that navigates the threshold between the tangible and the intangible, between the physical matter of sound and its almost spiritual dimension. Here, the voice-treated as pure acoustic substance-splits, dissolves, recomposes, becoming a tridimensional presence. Every frequency becomes a fragment of space in motion; every resonance, an opening in perception. It is an intimate and expansive work, an attempt to give form to what escapes, to what vibrates on the boundary between the real and the evanescent. A reminder that, at times, the deepest spaces are not the ones we see, but the ones we learn to listen to.

Simone Lorusso: Hi Elvio, your work is deeply rooted in the relationship between sound and space. How do you think acoustic architecture can shape the social dynamics of listening and the collective perception of a place?

Elvio Seta: I believe that acoustic architecture is not a background that simply hosts music, it is an active force. It determines how close or distant we are from one another, how much we move or remain still, and above all how we share attention. In places with a strong spatial identity, particularly sacred spaces or certain modernist architectures, sound does not simply propagate, it is written by geometry, materials, reflections, and decay times. This immediately changes the social nature of listening, it tends to slow it down, to make it more aware, almost ritualistic, because the audience perceives that what is happening is unrepeatable and dependent on that specific environment.

Moreover, when the sound source is not immediately identifiable, as in the acusmatic experience, something shifts on a collective level as well. Attention is no longer captured by the visible gesture of the performer, but by the perceptual event itself. This can create a particular social condition, people do not follow someone, they share a state of listening, a common suspension. It is as if architecture becomes a device that educates the group toward a different posture, less consumption, more presence.

There is also a point that is crucial for me, space is not neutral, it is a cultural fact. Bringing an electronic work into a building with a history and a symbolic function means activating that memory and bringing it into resonance with the present. In these cases, acoustic architecture does not only shape sound, it shapes the perception of the place itself, because people rediscover it through listening, and often rediscover it together, as a temporary community.

SL: You’ve built your own portable, modular Acusmonium. How do you believe this decision helps make acusmatic experiences more accessible and overcome the technical limitations of traditional performance spaces?

ES: The decision to build my own Acusmonium comes from a very concrete but also conceptual need. The great historical acusmatic systems are extraordinary tools, but they are often tied to specific places, complex infrastructures, and a certain idea of institution. This inevitably limits the possibility of bringing the acusmatic experience into different, less conventional, or simply more accessible contexts. Building a portable and modular system meant, for me, freeing spatialization from a fixed model. I wanted a tool capable of adapting to space, not of imposing a predefined configuration onto it. Every place has its own acoustic identity, and the system must be able to dialogue with it, changing layout, density, directionality, and scale. In this sense, the Acusmonium is not only a diffusion system, but a true extension of my compositional thinking.

"Today we live in an almost opposite context, everything tends toward speed, simplification, and immediate effect."

— Neuf Voix

At the same time, this choice also stems from a broader frustration. Spatialization today is still too poorly structured by those who curate and produce musical events. It is often treated as a specialist element, aimed at a niche audience or insiders, rather than as a central language of contemporary musical experience. As long as it remains confined to this niche, it struggles to reach a wider audience, and consequently there is little serious investment in its infrastructure.

This is clearly visible in performance spaces. Concert halls continue to be built or renovated almost exclusively for traditional instrumental or stereophonic music, while venues designed from the outset for multichannel, flexible, immersive diffusion are still extremely rare. This creates a vicious circle, the lack of spaces limits practices, and the limitation of practices justifies the lack of spaces. My Acusmonium is also a response to this situation, a way to demonstrate that spatialization is not a technical luxury, but an expressive necessity, and that it can exist with rigor and quality even outside the few historically equipped institutions.

SL: The avant-garde of the twentieth century is a constant presence in your research. How does that tension between rigor and freedom translate today, in an artistic landscape driven by speed, algorithms, and the aesthetics of immediacy?

ES: For me, the rigor of the historical avant-gardes has never been a matter of style or belonging, but of attitude. In figures such as Stockhausen, Nono, or Grisey, rigor was a tool to go deeper into the experience of sound, not to close it off. It was a way of creating the conditions for something unpredictable to happen. In this sense, rigor and freedom are not opposites, but two forces that sustain each other.

Today we live in an almost opposite context, everything tends toward speed, simplification, and immediate effect. Unfortunately, digital tools for making music also make almost everything increasingly easy and possible. In a historical moment in which almost anyone can make electronic music, if you do not refer to a deeper musical foundation, it is easy to get lost. In this scenario, rigor becomes almost an act of resistance. Taking the time to build a form, to work on the microstructure of sound and its evolution in space, means going against a logic of continuous and superficial production. At the same time, I do not believe in a nostalgic return to the avant-gardes. Freedom today also lies in knowing how to move through these systems without being completely determined by them. I use technology, but I try not to delegate fundamental artistic decisions to it. My work always originates from an intimate relationship with sound, which is then organized through personal structures. It is within this fragile but necessary balance that I continue to recognize myself.


SL: Your performances often create temporary communities in which the audience becomes part of the sonic device itself. What value do you attribute to this collective dimension of listening?

ES: The fact that the audience becomes part of the sonic device is not a metaphor. Bodies absorb, reflect, and modify sound, their presence truly changes the acoustic ecosystem. But there is also another level, less physical and more perceptual. When people share a deep, slowed down, undistracted form of listening, a collective attention emerges that is increasingly rare today. This is not participation in a spectacular or interactive sense, but a shared responsibility of listening.

These communities do not produce a stable identity, and they are not meant to. They are ephemeral communities, but they leave traces, in the way people perceive sound, space, and often each other. In an era in which many musical experiences are solitary and mediated by screens and headphones, it is important for me to create situations in which listening becomes a shared act again, almost political in the simplest sense of the word, an experience that redefines, even if only for a moment, how we are together.


SL: In Music for Dimensions, you explore the boundary between the tangible and the intangible, between the body and its vibrations. What role do you feel the “spiritual” plays in contemporary electronic music?

ES: The word spiritual is complex and, in a way, problematic, especially in the context of electronic music. I do not mean it in a religious sense, nor as an escape from reality. For me it has more to do with the experience of something that exceeds form, something that cannot be fully controlled or translated into a functional language. In this sense, the spiritual coincides with a deep perceptual dimension, in which the body and listening enter into a relationship different from everyday experience.

In Music for Dimensions, the work on the voice originates precisely from this idea. The voice is the most direct point of contact between body and sound, but when it is stripped of its narrative or semantic function, it becomes something else, a pure vibration, an unstable presence. Treating it as acoustic matter means allowing it to traverse space, to fragment, to multiply, until it becomes almost unrecognizable. In this process, the body does not disappear, but expands into space through frequencies.

I believe that today the spiritual dimension, if it still has meaning, lies precisely in this possibility of listening beyond immediacy, of remaining in a zone of ambiguity and suspension. In a world where everything tends to be explained, visualized, and made efficient, creating a space in which listening does not immediately lead to meaning but to experience is a necessary act. Electronic music still has enormous potential in this sense, precisely because it works with invisible forces, with energies that cannot be seen but that deeply pass through us.

“The voice is probably the most complex and ambiguous sound material we have. It is immediately recognizable and deeply linked to identity and the body, yet at the same time extremely unstable.”

— Neuf Voix

SL: You’ve lived and studied in very different contexts: Rome, Germany, Paris. How have these places, not only as physical spaces but as cultural environments, shaped your artistic language?

ES: I have passed through Berlin, Rome, and Paris at very different moments in my life, and this has profoundly influenced my artistic language. Each city corresponds to a specific phase of my formation, not only musical but also personal.

Berlin was the first stop, just after I turned eighteen, when my background consisted only of my studies at the conservatory in Pescara. It was a direct and almost brutal encounter with the real world of avant-garde music, in an immediately international dimension. There I encountered concerts, festivals, and artistic practices that were very different from one another and often far removed from academic contexts. This early experience allowed me to understand from the very beginning that music does not exist only as study or theory, but as a living, situated practice that must confront real contexts, spaces, and audiences.

Rome came later and represented the true phase of structuring. It was there that I built the fundamental skills needed to do this work, electronic composition, advanced synthesis, writing, and formal organization of sound. After the Berlin experience, Rome was the place where I was able to give technical solidity and compositional awareness to intuitions that until then had been more instinctive. Paris, finally, was the city of direction. Contact with the research environment and with the world of contemporary electronic avant-gardes led me to focus increasingly on sound spatialization. It was there that I found a language that truly felt like my own, allowing me to integrate technology, space, and perception into a coherent vision. More than adding an aesthetic, Paris, especially IRCAM and the GRM, gave a precise direction to my work.

SL: In your work, the voice is rarely narrative; it becomes acoustic matter, gesture, breath. What fascinates you most about the human voice as a malleable sonic instrument?

ES: The voice is probably the most complex and ambiguous sound material we have. It is immediately recognizable and deeply linked to identity and the body, yet at the same time extremely unstable. For this very reason, I am interested in removing it from its narrative or communicative function and bringing it back to a more primary condition, breath, vibration, energy. When the voice stops saying something, it starts doing something. It becomes gesture, matter that moves through space, fragments, extends, and multiplies. By working on it electronically, I can use it as an oscillator, the element that produces the sonic mass in a synthesizer, transforming it into a three dimensional presence that no longer belongs to a single individual but to the environment itself.

What fascinates me most is precisely this tension. The voice always remains human, even when it is heavily transformed. It carries with it a trace of the body, a fragility, which makes listening immediately intimate, because it is the sound through which we are most accustomed to recognizing another life.

SL: Looking ahead, are you imagining new forms of interaction between audiences and sound? In your view, where is spatialization headed as an artistic language in contemporary practice?

ES: Rather than imagining explicit forms of interaction, I am interested in rethinking the quality of listening and its perception. I am not particularly drawn to interactive models based on direct control or spectacularized participation. I prefer to work with more subtle forms of involvement, in which the listener does not act upon sound, but is crossed by it, influenced by it, placed in a different perceptual condition.

I believe that the future of spatialization lies less in increasing technological complexity and more in its deep integration with bodily experience. Today we have extremely powerful tools, but they are often used to create effects rather than relationships. For me, spatialization should increasingly become an autonomous compositional language, capable of articulating time, movement, and listening, not merely distributing sound in space.

I see a possible direction in more site specific practices, more attentive to real architecture, materials, and the presence of bodies. Spaces that are not filled with sound, but temporarily rewritten through it. In this sense, the audience is not a final recipient, but an active component of the perceptual ecosystem. If there is one thing I hope for, it is that spatialization will stop being perceived as an addition or a technical luxury, merely useful for hearing cars passing behind you during a film screening in a cinema, and instead be recognized for what it can be, a different way of thinking about music, listening, and our being in space.