Listen from the inside

OPEN Cultural, in full “Oriental Partnership for Educational Needs in Cultural”, is a project of Italy’s conservatories aimed at East Asia. The goal is an international learning environment: shared study paths, with joint degrees in view, and projects of research and artistic innovation.

The vehicle is the system of the National Orchestras of the Italian Conservatories: Symphonic, Baroque and Jazz. The moment of greatest visibility was Expo 2025 Osaka.

Lead institution

Conservatorio di Musica “Ottorino Respighi”, Latina

Partners

• Istituto Pantheon Design & Technology, Rome
• Conservatorio di Musica “Giuseppe Verdi”, Milan
• Conservatorio di Musica “Alessandro Scarlatti”, Palermo
• Conservatorio di Musica “Giuseppe Nicolini”, Piacenza

Countries it looks to

Japan, Vietnam, South Korea

The four phases

1. 1
   Prepare

   The conservatories, through their delegates, choose the areas of collaboration and research, plan the meetings with the academies of the three countries, and present methods and programmes for masterclasses and workshops.

2. 2
   Start

   Masterclasses, international research groups, mobility of students, researchers and teachers, artistic production.

3. 3
   At the centre

   Expo 2025 Osaka: the concerts of the National Orchestras and the productions of the international working groups.

4. 4
   Consolidate

   The results become the basis of an international postgraduate school of orchestral training, with a technology hub at the Latina conservatory.

• The project sheet on the website of the Italian Ministry of University and Research (PDF, in Italian)
• The project on the Nicolini Conservatory’s pages: documents (in Italian)
• The project on the Nicolini Conservatory’s pages, in English

OPEN Cultural – Oriental, INTAFAM00062, CUP F21I23000600006, PNRR Mission 4 Component 1 Investment 3.4, NextGenerationEU.

On 20 and 21 August 2025, at 6 pm local time, the Orchestra Nazionale Jazz dei Conservatori Italiani, the national jazz orchestra of Italy’s conservatories, played at the Matsuri Arena of Expo 2025 Osaka, opening the concerts of Elisa and Achille Lauro. The programme, “Jazz in Italy | Italy in Jazz”, was conducted and arranged by Pino Jodice.

On stage, twenty musicians from thirteen conservatories: four voices, four trumpets, three trombones and a bass trombone, five saxophones, piano, electric bass, drums. Both concerts were streamed in 360° with immersive audio on the YouTube channel of the Piacenza conservatory.

On 11 October 2025, two days before Expo closed, it was the turn of the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale dei Conservatori, the national symphony orchestra of Italy’s conservatories, conducted by Gianna Fratta in the National Day Hall. The programme: the theme from Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “The Last Emperor”, orchestrated by P. Vivaldi and A. Sartini, Berlioz’s overture “Le Carnaval romain”, Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 “Italian” and Tchaikovsky’s “Capriccio italien”.

On stage were sixty-nine musicians, fifty-nine of them from thirty-eight Italian conservatories and music institutes. For this project the orchestra comes under the Conservatorio “Ottorino Respighi” of Latina, the lead partner. This concert too was filmed in 360° with immersive audio: it is the one in the second player.

The recording

On stage there were three things that are not usually there.

• Ambisonics

  A recording that keeps the direction each sound comes from. In the players it is rendered in third-order Ambisonics: enough resolution to tell one section from another.

• A microphone with many capsules

  A microphone system with a high number of capsules, so that listening can be pointed afterwards, at playback.

• Insta360 Titan

  A camera that films in 360° at 11K: the viewer can turn anywhere, including towards the audience behind.

Who played

The names come from the line-ups published on Sinfonie Digitali, the website of the three national orchestras. For the symphony orchestra each name is followed by the conservatory or institute the musician comes from; the asterisk marks the principals.

Footage like this is best watched with a headset: you turn your head and the sound turns with you. But hardly anyone owns a headset. The two players run in a browser, on computers and phones.

• Immersive Jazz

  The Orchestra Nazionale Jazz dei Conservatori Italiani at the Matsuri Arena, Expo 2025 Osaka.

  Open Immersive Jazz(opens in a new tab)
• Immersive Sinfonica

  The Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale dei Conservatori, conducted by Gianna Fratta, in the National Day Hall of Expo 2025 Osaka on 11 October 2025: the theme from Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “The Last Emperor”; on the screen, the Italian and Japanese flags.

  Open Immersive Sinfonica(opens in a new tab)

What you can do

• Turn your gaze through 360°, dragging with the mouse or a finger.
• Choose an area of the scene to listen to: the focus narrows until it isolates a section, an instrument, a voice.
• Listen on headphones to binaural sound, computed for the two ears, which follows the direction of your gaze.

How they are built

The players are GR STUDIO’s own. They started from HOAST360, an open-source library by the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) of the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz for streaming 360° video with higher-order Ambisonics audio, and were developed until they became something else: listening narrows onto a section or a single instrument. They use third-order Ambisonics audio and are published on the studio’s own Cloudflare space.

• HOAST360, the IEM Graz website
• HOAST360 on GitHub

The Conservatorio di Musica “Giuseppe Nicolini” of Piacenza, a partner of the project, entrusted GR STUDIO SRL with the scientific responsibility for the project. The assignment is organised in four tasks.

1. Project direction
2. Coordination of live events
3. Production coordination
4. Research and test programme with the partners

What we brought home

• A 360° capture and streaming chain with immersive audio, tested on an open-air stage on the other side of the world, with the audience in front.
• Two published experiences that open in any browser, with no headset and nothing to install.
• A way of listening that you can point, which we now bring to the other projects of the lab.

• The Four Turandot

  With The Four Turandot, Oriental shares the lab, the tools and the underlying idea: to step inside the music, instead of watching it from outside. On its site you choose the four endings by pulling a thread.

  The Four Turandot website
• The story on the GR STUDIO site

  The project told among the studio’s other works.

  Oriental: a concert at Expo 2025 Osaka, to listen to from the inside

The concert photographs belong to those who took them: we do not copy them here, we link to them. The frames on this page come from the project’s own 360° recordings. Institutions are named in full, without logos.