The proposed research will study musical gestures and the movement of sounds in space by means of investigating their expressive potential and listeners’ reception, with the goal of developing a needed, authoritative and organised vocabulary of spatial attributes. This will be achieved through the analysis of spatiality in creative practice, categorising spatial gestures according to their intended musical purpose, and establishing their affective potential via a series of auditory tests for both specialist and non-specialist listeners. Concurrent praxis will complement the developing theory, integrating the novel spatial vocabulary into compositions and performances along with spatialisation software and hardware, thereby guaranteeing its applicability.