Alessandro Paganelli designs sound as a structural force: not a background layer, but the element that determines how a space is felt before anyone speaks, moves, or looks. He works at the intersection of music and scenography, building sonic environments for fashion, ballet, and film that shape the room as much as the visual work they accompany.

His approach comes from a simple conviction: music's function is transmission, not expression. Rather than demonstrating emotion, his scores are built to carry presence, creating a bridge where an audience can hear itself reflected back. As he puts it:

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"When I compose, I search for a key to access the place wherein a bridge between the sound and the listener is created, a space where we can hear ourselves reflected through the music."

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This sensibility has shaped his work across disciplines. For fashion, he has created scores for couture houses including Rami Al Ali, Peet Dullaert, Lihi Hod, and Tony Ward, with work presented at Paris and New York Fashion Week. Rather than functioning as accompaniment, these scores are conceived as part of the environment of the collection: sound as scenography.

For the screen, his work includes the award-winning documentaries Distilled (Best Documentary, Berlin Indie Film Festival 2024) and Dominique (Best Short Documentary, Wyoming International Film Festival; Humanitarian Award, DOC Utah; broadcast on SDPB), where his scores deepen narrative through restraint as much as through statement. In dance, he has scored international full-length ballets including Mortar & Pestle (NYC) and a contemporary reimagining of The Nutcracker, and La Sylphide with choreographer Aaron Thao alongside experimental dance-film work with Shannon Maynor.

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Alongside commissioned work, Paganelli has released the EPs Drifting (2017) and Nebula (2018), and the album Sum (2020).

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His musical foundation is classical. He began studying classical guitar at seven and trained at the Conservatorium Maastricht and the Accademia Chigiana under Oscar Ghiglia, Carlo Marchione, and Alan Belkin, later performing across Europe as a soloist and orchestral guitarist.

That foundation — precision, structure, deep listening — now underlies a practice focused less on genre than on presence: what a sound world does to the people standing inside it.

Now based in Berlin, Paganelli continues to create sound worlds for creative partners who need more than a score — who need the atmosphere itself designed.