The focus of this original and informative study is the relation between sacred music and architecture in sixteenth-century Venice. 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. These were also measured by acousticians, and subjective responses were elicited from audiences and singers. The acoustic data is analysed in a series of appendices, while select musical tracks are available to download online. But the internet is ephemeral, and since the choral experiments inform the book's conclusions these recordings should probably have been supplied to readers on an accompanying CD. I should also have liked to see more examples of musical notation among the text: only the opening bars of Giovanni Gabrieli's Timor et tremor are reproduced and further excerpts would have been welcome. The centre of musical innovation in Renaissance Venice was of course San Marco, whose maestro di cappella, Adrian Willaert, regularly ‘rubbed shoulders’ with the architect Jacopo Sansovino. This book proves beyond reasonable doubt that Sansovino's alterations to the chancel in the 1540s responded in part to the needs of musical performance, providing spatial separation for Willaert's complex double-choir psalm settings. But textual and visual evidence also indicates that singers occupied the bigonzo, a large polygonal nave-pulpit, and the choral experiments confirmed that this, too, was an effective position for certain aspects of the repertoire. The issue is not as black-and-white as some scholars have assumed: as with any choral foundation, protocol at San Marco was evidently labile, constantly evolving in response to liturgical and musical demands. San Marco aside, this book examines all of Sansovino's surviving Venetian churches, each of which has, or was intended to have, a flat ceiling. While such compact spaces as these promote clarity in choral polyphony, experiments also revealed the extent to which they drain sacred music of its mysticism; whether Sansovino designed churches to reflect advances in musical composition is, for this reason among others, moot. Circumstantial evidence suggests that this might have been so at San Giuliano but the authors adduce no specific proof that the architect placed acoustics ‘high on the design agenda’ elsewhere. Ingeniously, the project also made use of computer simulation and anechoic recording to reconstruct the soundscape of Sansovino's lost church of the Incurabili. This hospital church, demolished in 1831, was revered for its exemplary acoustic yet this appears to have been attained ‘almost accidentally’ rather than by design. Moreover, 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. This book's central question – did architects intentionally seek acoustic effects in the churches that they designed? – therefore remains insoluble. None the less, Howard and Moretti have covered substantial new ground, deftly uniting three disciplines that have rarely been considered together.