** Bilingual ita/eng version ** Curated by NUB (Francesca Lenzi / Federico Fiori) e Gabriele Tosi, Sound Chapters: Voices of Sound Experimentation in Italy is a book that listens as much as it speaks. Conceived as a hybrid volume devoted to Italy’s contemporary sound art scene, it treats written text as an intimate extension of voice - a way for language to carry breath, grain and accent even when the speaker is absent. Here, words behave like a subtle form of ventriloquism: they mimic distant vocalities, echo the cadences of performances and installations, and allow multiple, sometimes conflicting, voices to coexist in the same space. Across its pages, stories sit alongside research papers, poems rub up against essays, scores and songs flow into curatorial reflections, all resonating without hierarchy. The result is not a tidy survey but a living chorus, alert to the fact that any attempt to fix sound in print will necessarily be partial, fragmentary, and all the more revealing for it.

Rather than enforcing a single academic tone, the volume draws deliberately on contributions that defy conventional writing practices. Artists who usually compose in feedback, field recordings or feedback loops turn to the page with the same experimental instincts; researchers and curators write from within the infrastructures they help shape; cultural organizers let their everyday negotiations with institutions and communities seep into the text. This mix expands the bibliography around Italian sound art in a way that is fluid and inclusive, refusing the neat boundaries between theory, documentation and artistic work. In these “chapters,” analysis often arrives disguised as anecdote, and critical positions are articulated through hybrid forms - diaristic notes, performative scripts, speculative scores. The book becomes, in effect, a reader that is also an artwork: a device for transmitting practices that typically resist capture.

The project is anchored in a specific community and timeframe. Its authors - among them Marco Baldini, Elena Biserna, Luca Boffi, Andrea Borghi, Mattia Capelletti, Francesco Cavaliere, Stefano De Ponti, Nicola Di Croce, Giulia Deval, Alessandra Eramo, Paolo Gabriotti, Giulia Gonfiantini, Renato Grieco, Riccardo La Foresta, Enrico Malatesta, Chiara Pavolucci, Leandro Pisano, Diana Lola Posani, Radio Papesse, and Francesco Toninelli - are not distant observers, but active participants in Italy’s experimental sound art network over the past decade. Their work spans performance, installation, radio, publishing, pedagogy and activism, and those threads are audible in the way they write. Reading the book, you move through contact zones: between North and South, big cities and provincial contexts, institutional museums and self‑organized spaces, concert situations and site‑specific interventions. What emerges is a cartography of practices built less on stylistic labels and more on shared questions about listening, space, technology and community.

Sound Chapters also functions as the catalog for Mezz’aria. La strana apertura della ricerca sonora, a collective project that unfolded within the exhibition context of the Museo del Novecento e del Contemporaneo at Palazzo Fabroni in Pistoia between May 20 and August 15, 2023. As a catalog, it documents the constellation of works, events and conversations that made up Mezz’aria; as an autonomous volume, it extends that exhibition in time, turning its temporary, air‑borne explorations of sound research into a durable, yet still porous, reference point. The title “Mezz’aria” - literally “mid‑air” - is echoed in the book’s structure: chapters hover between documentation and proposition, between remembering what happened in the museum and imagining what might happen next in studios, streets and listening rooms across Italy and beyond. In giving page space to such a range of formats and voices, Sound Chapters: Voices of Sound Experimentation in Italy establishes itself as both a snapshot and a starting point - a way of tuning in to a scene that is most alive when it refuses to stand still.