This dissertation project examines avant-garde installation practices from the 1960s through the 1990s in North America and Italy, focusing on how artists treated sound not as isolated composition but as a spatial and embodied practice. These works emerged at the intersections of art, music, theater, and media, generating immersive environments in which sound, light, architecture, and bodily movement became co-constitutive elements of aesthetic experience.

This project argues that installation art reorganized listening as a social and multisensorial practice. Rather than presenting sound as an object for detached contemplation, these works staged environments in which audiences practiced perception through movement, vibration, gesture, and shared spatial encounter. By bringing musicology into dialogue with art history, performance studies, and disability studies, this dissertation shows how avant-garde installations challenged normative sensory hierarchies and modeled alternative practices of listening, access, and collaboration.

Situating American and Italian artists within transnational networks of studios, troupes, and experimental collectives, this project reframes installation art as a field of embodied, relational practice—one in which sound reshaped how audiences inhabit space and encounter one another.