Through his own experience and practice, Adam Basanta came up with a guide outlining different strategies for composing gallery sound pieces, with a particular focus in time and space and how they relate to each other to shape the form of a gallery. The first strategy in this guide is Inquiring Across Disciplines, what it’s meant by this is the natural division between the concept of form inside the musical practice and in the context of sound art galleries. Sound is forced to inquire in media as visual art and sculpture to fulfil the spatial demands of a gallery space, in the other hand music performances do not take into consideration space as one of the main compositional demands. “Sound materials are dispersed spatially and temporally, and are experienced by a mobile visitor at their own space”. Because of the autonomy of the audience in a sound gallery piece, the form of the piece has to be designed towards a first-person experience.

Basanta explains that to design this first person experience its crucial to think about time as one of the main modulators of the dimension of the piece, Olafur Eliasson explains that without time the individual experiencing the piece cannot engage with the form and its excluded of experiencing the sequential matter of it. Considering this it’s important to point out that there is not a single experience “there are at least as many forms as there are visitors experiencing the work”.

The figure above is an example of an architectonical analysis of a sound gallery piece. Its use is to map listening positions and how these are affected by the architecture of the space, knowledge in acoustics is helpful to avoid unwanted sonic features. Listening spots can determine the narrative of the piece and by the correct placing of sound sources linear or quasi linear narratives can be created.