Vanesa Massa composes in space. The Buenos Aires-based Argentine artist works at the intersection of acousmatic music, spatial audio, and multichannel electroacoustic installation — building sonic architectures where the movement of sound through a room is as compositional as pitch or timbre. A graduate of UNTREF (Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero), Massa has presented work at NIME, ICMC, and CMMAS (Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras), establishing her within the Latin American and international electroacoustic research circuit.
Artistic Practice
Massa’s compositional practice begins with a spatial question: where does sound come from, where does it go, and what does that movement mean? Her acousmatic works are designed for multichannel diffusion — composed to be heard in specific speaker configurations where the listener is surrounded, enveloped, or isolated by sound arriving from different positions. This is not spectacle. It is a compositional decision that treats the listening space as a formal element equivalent in importance to harmonic structure or rhythmic organisation.
Her electroacoustic compositions draw on the acousmatic tradition rooted in the musique concrète lineage, while integrating contemporary spatial processing techniques — particularly ambisonics, which allows sound to be encoded and decoded for arbitrary speaker arrays or binaural headphone reproduction. Ambisonics enables her to compose a single work that can be legitimately performed in a four-channel studio, a twenty-four-channel concert venue, or a binaural recording distributed digitally, without losing the spatial intentionality of the original.
The multichannel installation dimension of her practice extends these spatial concerns into gallery and public space contexts. Installations operate on longer time scales than concert performances, demanding different compositional strategies — she has spoken about the distinction between music designed for a seated audience with a defined listening duration and sound that must function for visitors who arrive, pause, and leave at unpredictable moments.
Her connection to the Amplify DAI network situates her within a broader Latin American conversation about spatial audio and electroacoustic composition — a community of practice that includes researchers, composers, and technologists working across institutional and independent contexts throughout the region.
Tools and Methods
Massa works with ambisonics as her primary spatial framework, using Higher Order Ambisonics (HOA) encoding and decoding to control the three-dimensional positioning of sound sources. Max/MSP is central to her compositional and performance toolkit — she uses it both for real-time processing in live contexts and for offline composition of fixed electroacoustic works. The combination gives her a single environment that spans both the studio and the stage, with consistent spatial behaviour across different speaker configurations.
Spatial diffusion — the practice of manually routing sound across a multichannel speaker array during performance — is another technique she employs. Unlike purely automated playback, diffusion preserves the performer’s interpretive presence in the acoustic space. This is a practice with deep roots in acousmatic music performance tradition, and Massa’s engagement with it connects her to that lineage while extending it through contemporary HOA tools.
Her presentations at NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) and ICMC (International Computer Music Conference) indicate a research-practice engagement with the field — she is not only composing but contributing to the technical and theoretical discourse around spatial audio in electroacoustic music. CMMAS in Mexico has been another significant venue for her work, reflecting the strong regional network for electroacoustic research that exists between Argentina, Mexico, and other Latin American music technology centres.
Selected Works
Massa’s multichannel acousmatic works have been presented in concert and installation contexts across Latin America and internationally. Her NIME and ICMC submissions represent peer-reviewed contributions to the research literature — papers and demonstrations that document specific technical or compositional problems she has addressed within her practice. These publications make her work available within academic discourse in a way that recorded releases alone cannot.
Her presentations at CMMAS (Mexico) are significant within the regional context: CMMAS is one of the principal Latin American centres for electroacoustic music research and performance, and selection for its programmes indicates recognition within the specialist community. The Buenos Aires electroacoustic scene from which she emerges — connected through UNTREF’s music technology programmes to a broader Argentine and regional network — provides the institutional basis for the spatial audio practice she has developed.
A catalogue of specific works with full diffusion specifications and programme notes is maintained through her institutional affiliations and conference proceedings.
See also: Amplify DAI resources on spatial audio and electroacoustic composition.
