RESEARCH
My research investigates musical access through materials, DIY instrument-building, and situated pedagogy. I work with self-built instruments — monochords, feedback devices, electromagnetic excitation systems — to explore how construction itself can become a form of musical learning. Drawing on craft theory, material engagement, and sound studies, my practice-based work asks how reduced, unstable, and reclaimed materials can lower barriers to musical participation without simplifying its complexity.
Chelys Sonorum
Chelys Sonorum is a corpus of self-built, electromagnetically actuated guitars, developed as a robotic feedback-based instrument family. Built from reclaimed resonant bodies and unstable excitation systems, these instruments replace fixed gesture–sound relationships with dynamic, partially unpredictable interactions, treating feedback not as a technical defect but as a condition for listening, adaptation, and musical practice.From this corpus, two lines of work have developed. Sei Solo is a workshop-based collective performance built from broomstick monochords, contact transducers, and patchable electromagnetic exciters: participants construct their own instrument before playing it, reducing the guitar to one of its most elementary conditions: a single string, a support, a feedback loop; to support collaborative, anti-virtuosic forms of music-making.
I've Used to Play It, commissioned for To Listen To (Turin, 2025, Guido Costa Projects), is a sound installation built around a self-resonating electroacoustic guitar that autonomously performs fragments of iconic popular-music riffs, reworked in real time through controlled feedback and modulation. The piece takes as its starting point the true story of the last male Kauai ʻōʻō, a now-extinct Hawaiian bird who kept singing his mating call in 1987, though no one remained to answer.
This research is grounded in craft theory, material engagement theory, and Agostino Di Scipio's ecological account of sound as interface, and has developed in part during a period of visiting research at the Orpheus Instituut (Ghent).
GUGLIELMO DIANA
Graduated in jazz guitar at the Antonio Vivaldi Conservatory of Alessandria in 2018 and master in electronic music at the “Giuseppe Verdi” Conservatorium of Torino in 2021.
Actually PHD in “Sound and Music Computing & Cultural Heritage” at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatorium of Music in Turin with the instruments corpus Chelys Sonorum, a robotic feedback based guitars.
Deeply rooted in a theatrical background, his work focuses on gesture and the relationship between body and sound. He works in theater, performance, installations, video games, and cinematic contexts, collaborating with organizations such as Piccola Compagnia della Magnolia, Pietra Tonale, Epica Film, and Tmesis Studio.
GUG <3
CV