Sound and space in Renaissance Venice. Architecture, music, acoustics

The book results from meticulous archival and library work, but the authors' principal and most revealing method is empirical: during April 2007 the choir of St John's College, Cambridge, was employed to test the acoustic properties of eleven Venetian churches. Ingeniously, the project also made use of computer simulation and anechoic recording to reconstruct the soundscape of Sansovino's lost church of the Incurabili. [...]St John's College choir found the interiors of San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore, Andrea Palladio's great Venetian churches, excessively resonant and ill-suited to the performance of polyphony - a defect observed too by Vincenzo Scamozzi in 1615.