Info & Bio
Cobi van Tonder
Dr. Cobi van Tonder is an internationally active composer, researcher, and interdisciplinary artist specializing in heritage acoustics, virtual acoustics, and immersive spatial audio. She is currently a Research Fellow in the Department of Architecture at the University of Bologna, and a former Marie Skłodowskaurie Fellow at the University of York.
She is a composer working across instrumental, electronic, and spatial sound practices, and has presented over forty works internationally across Europe, the United States, Africa and Asia. She is the creator of the virtual heritage listening platform AcousticAtlas.de, through which listening becomes an artistic, architectural, and conservation methodology.
Her artistic output explores microtonal tunings, difference tones, beating patterns, recursive virtual acoustics, and infrasound-based audio–sensory hybrid experiences. Selected works include Vertical Time, Gala, Mutation II, Echoes and Reflections, Goodbye Anthill, Delta Bioresonance Variations, and Half wave 1.5 Hz.
Research & Academic Practice
Cobi holds a PhD in Digital Arts & Humanities (Music Composition) from Trinity College Dublin, an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University, and a B.Hons in Musicology from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
Her research has been supported by major international funding bodies, including a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, Erasmus+ projects, and multiple institutional research grants. She has served as Organising Chair for the Immersive 3D Audio (I3DA) Conferences 2023 and 2025, and is currently co-creating I3DA 2026.
She publishes widely in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences, including the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Forum Acusticum, and I3DA, and contributes to major edited volumes on sound, space, and heritage acoustics.
About the Work
Her practice is rooted in the exploration of sound as space and space as compositional material. From early networked acoustic architectures to contemporary heritage auralisation systems, her work constructs immersive listening environments that reveal invisible spatial structures and cultural memory through sound.
Projects such as The Audio Tunnel and The Persistence of Sound pioneered live networked acoustic displacement, linking real architectural spaces into recursive acoustic tunnels that allow sound to travel, reverberate, and transform across geographic distance.
Artistic Focus
Her work spans composition, installation, sensory enclosures, sound sculpture, networked systems, and immersive spatial audio. Core materials include microtonal pitch fields, beating patterns, auditory illusions, slow transformations, and artificial acoustics as compositional substance.
Influences range from abstract expressionist painting and Japanese Zen gardens to drone music, extended duration, immersion, spatial audio, and sensory hybrid practices combining sound with light, touch, and architecture.
