This thesis asks how a shared sonic environment might help a group of strangers move from the individual enclosure of a comfort zone toward the collective, provisional condition of a safer space. It approaches the question not by prescribing how such a space should be produced, but by building one and describing what building it required.
The research is conducted through artistic practice. Its name is Augmented Hymns for Solitary Dances, a participatory performance for up to ten people at the Immersive Art Space, ZHdK, in which motion capture reads the collective behaviour of the audience, how gathered they are, how similarly they move, how many are present, and a real-time system answers in spatialised sound and light. There are no instructions, no explanation, and no reward: the system does not score behaviour, and no state of the room outranks another. The composed material is authored, but its arrangement in time and its live mixing, including the author's own voice and instrument, are handed to the crowd.
The theoretical frame draws on Foucault's heterotopia, Schafer's and LaBelle's accounts of soundscape and acoustic community, Rancière's and Bishop's competing positions on participation and authorship, and Gibson's and Keylin's affordance theory. The thesis argues that an immediate, embodied sense of agency – the felt sense of oneself as a cause – is what allows a safer space to form, and that legibility is therefore the hard limit on every design decision.
The system is documented in full, including the divergences between what it measures and what its terms are named, a discrepancy that turned out to be productive rather than incidental. Since the piece premieres after submission, the thesis concludes on the design rather than on its reception: it reports what could be answered by making, and identifies what only a room full of people can answer.