The musical work, today more than ever, is a complex, multimodal experience that transcends the dimension of sound alone. Through the interweaving and interaction of multiple sensory modalities, compositional practices and modes of reception are redefined, opening new spaces for theoretical reflection on a dynamic and partially unexplored reality.
An initial theoretical impulse to redefine the concept of the musical work in relation to multimedia dates back to Dick Higgins, who in 1966 published the article Intermedia, a term coined to describe artistic practices situated in the boundary zones between different disciplines, thus paving the way for a conception of the work as a processual experience rather than as a finished product. Approximately thirty years later, Nicholas Cook proposed a systematic theoretical reflection on these phenomena in Analysing Musical Multimedia (1998), distinguishing between three models of multimediality: conformance, contest, and complementation. Here too, music and the musical artwork are approached as territories of border-crossing and hybridization, rather than as objects defined solely through the auditory dimension. More recently, following in the wake of these earlier studies, Gianmario Borio and Sara Gennaro, in Multimedialità e metamorfosi del concetto di opera (2008), attempt a critical historical-theoretical synthesis of the phenomenon through the theoretical categories of intermedia, mixed-media, and multimedia, applied to highlight the existing relations between processes of artistic border-crossing and the redefinition of aesthetic experience. During the same period, Harry Lehmann in Die digitale Revolution der Musik: Eine Musikphilosophie (2012) questions the role that new technologies and the changed socio-economic context play in redefining the categories of work, score, composer, performer, and audience.
“Music Beyond Sound” aims to investigate the integration of multiple sensory modalities in contemporary compositional practices with the purpose of defining new tools for research, creation, and pedagogy in composition from historiographical, theoretical, and methodological perspectives. Possible areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• New technologies for composition and multimediality
• Musical writing / representation / notation / score
• Multimodal compositional practices / techniques
• Sound art and installations
• Intersections between the arts
• Pedagogy of multimodal composition
• Performance and multimodal performance environments
• Media archaeology and preservation, archival recovery
• The plural artist and plural performer

The whole conference is streamed on Teams. For info: maurizio.azzan@conservatoriomantova.com

Organizing Committee
Maurizio Azzan (Conservatorio di Mantova)
Luca Guidarini (Conservatorio di Mantova)
Michele Leggieri (Università di Pavia-Cremona)
Ingrid Pustijanac (Università di Pavia-Cremona)
Lorenzo Troiani (Conservatorio di Mantova)

Scientific Committee
Maurizio Azzan (Conservatorio di Mantova)
Zeno Baldi (Conservatorio di Mantova)
Ingrid Pustijanac (Università di Pavia-Cremona)
Lorenzo Troiani (Conservatorio di Mantova)

PROGRAMME

Wednesday 10 June 2026

10:00-10:30
Institutional Welcome and Opening Remarks

Session 1
Chair: Maurizio Azzan

10:30-12:00
STEFANO LOMBARDI VALLAURI (Università IULM, Milano)
Musicology of the Audiovisual: Category-Based Tools for a Fine-Grained Interpretation of Complex Objects

- break -

12:15-13:00
GIOVANNI SANTINI (Duke-Kunshan University)
From Notation to Participation: A Decade of Immersive Creative Practice

Session 2
Chair: Michele Leggieri

15:00-16:30
LUCA BEFERA (Università degli Studi di Torino)
The Box in the Box: Creative Process and Scenic Environments between Performance and Artificial Intelligence

- break -

16:45-17:15
JACOPO CENNI (Conservatorio di Cesena)
Toward a Morphology-Aware Framework for Multimodal Composition

17:15-17:45
LUCA MUCCI (Conservatorio di Cesena) & SOFIA BIAVA (Università di Bologna)
Sound Studies and Ethnographic Practice: Exploring Synergies Between Acousmatic Music and Anthropological Inquiry

Thursday 11 June 2026

Session 3
Chair: Ingrid Pustijanac
10:30-12:00
MARGARETHE MAIERHOFER-LISCHKA (University of Arts and Design Linz)
Idio-Synchresis: Multimodality in Music at the Crossroads of Disciplines

- break -

12:15-13:00
ALEXANDER KHUBEEV (freelance artist)
Gesture as Compositional Force: Balancing Visual and Sonic Structures in Multimedia Music

Session 4
Chair: Luca Guidarini

15:00-15:30
MARCO DE MARTINO (Conservatorio della Spezia)
Practices of Presence: Materiality and Dramaturgy in the Compositional Process

15:30-16:00
MANUEL ZWERGER (Conservatorio di Mantova)
The Instrument as Dynamic System: Toward a Context-Related Taxonomy of Audiovisual Preparation

16:00-16:30
ROBERTO MARIA MONGARDINI (Conservatorio di Novara)
Gesture as an Expressive Catalyst: A Holistic Multimodal Approach to Live Electronics

- break -

17:15-18:00
Closing discussion

Music Beyond Sounds

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