Proceedings of the XIV Colloquium on Musical Informatics (XIV CIM 2003), Firenze, Italy, May 8-9-10, 2003

Sound and architecture: an electronic music installation at the new auditorium in Rome Francesco Giomi, Damiano Meacci and Kilian Schwoon Centro Tempo Reale Firenze [fg, dm, kilian]@centrotemporeale.it

ABSTRACT
The paper describes the design and the realization of a big sound installation produced by Tempo Reale for the inauguration of Renzo Pianos new auditorium in Rome. Such work required a close collaboration between musicians and architects. The authors describe the general principles of the work, continuing with the criteria adopted to interpret electronic music in space. The general features of the technical system are also discussed.

1. INTRODUCTION At the beginning of 2002, the Santa Cecilia National Academy asked Tempo Reale to design and realize a big sound installation conceived by Luciano Berio and dedicated to electronic music for several locations inside Renzo Pianos new auditorium in Rome.

Fig. 1: Map of the auditorium complex; areas involved in the installation are shown in bold

The installation was realized during the two days of inauguration of the auditorium, which took CIM-1

place in April 2002. It involved four different areas, inside and outside the buildings (see fig. 1): the big semicircular foyer, the outside area around the cavea, the Renzo Piano exhibition area and the big Santa Cecilia concert hall, still under construction at that time and inaugurated separately in December 2002. One of the most important aims of the installation was the discovery through music of the different original spaces of the new architectural structure. This was made possible by the collaboration of the musicians with the group of architects of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop who were in charge of the visual and structural design of auditorium. This collaboration was particularly important because all buildings were still under construction during the period of design and studio preparation of the installation, and it was not possible to have a realistic idea of the architectural scene. This was problematic for example for the placing of the loudspeakers. Moreover, many choices about the visual design of the sound installation had to fit several aesthetical criteria in relationship with shapes, objects and materials already present in the chosen spaces. Even though there were four areas involved, the installation was musically divided into two parts. The first included foyer, outside (cavea) and exhibition area; in these cases the musical material was derived from a series of electroacoustic pieces by adding a spatial interpretation to their stereophonic characteristics. The general spatialization system developed by Tempo Reale already included a series of complex algorithms but it was extended for this event in order to allow a closer link with the specific architecture. Such algorithms realized movements specifically suggested by the shapes of the involved spaces and by the particular configuration of mounted loudspeakers. The music used in these areas included excerpts from pieces by Franois Bayle, John Chowning, Pietro Grossi, Mauricio Kagel, Gyrgy Ligeti, Bruno Maderna, Bernard Parmegiani, Henri

Proceedings of the XIV Colloquium on Musical Informatics (XIV CIM 2003), Firenze, Italy, May 8-9-10, 2003

Pousseur, Steve Reich, Jean Claude Risset, Denis Smalley, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Daniel Teruggi. The second, autonomous part of the installation was located in the Santa Cecilia concert hall (the biggest hall of the auditorium) and included fragments from Berios pieces, performed with an elliptical configuration of loudspeakers, specifically located to underline the geometry and the huge dimensions of the space. This part of the installation was not open to general audience but could be experienced through guided tours. Several people were involved in the realization of the project besides the authors: Lelio Camilleri and Paolo Pachini collaborated on the musical part and Francesco Canavese on the technical aspects. Dino and Massimo Carli of BH-Audio service and by Daniele Tebaldi and Ralf Zuleeg of d&b audiotechnik, the audio equipment company that conceptually collaborated for the installation design, also made relevant contribution.

2. THE SONIC ARCHITECTURE An important guideline set out by Luciano Berio for the organization of the sonic architecture was the idea of a polyphonic global sensation - that attention should not be drawn away by single outstanding events and their trajectories in space, but should focus on the interaction between the movements of different sound layers.

Fig. 2: Positions of loudspeakers in the foyer

The various spatialization algorithms used to characterize these layers were essentially based on indeterministic approaches. For example, continuous movements with irregular changes of direction, or discontinuous movements with random positions and random durations for rests and transitions were used. In all these cases the CIM-2

indeterminacy occurs within certain constraints (time ranges for the choice of durations, weights for the probability of certain loudspeaker constellations, etc.) Many of the algorithms had already been developed at Tempo Reale for performances with a central listening field and a circular spatialization system around it (for example for the installation Geografia for the Italian pavilion of the world Expo 2000 in Hannover, with a dome-shaped architectural structure). In fact, the installation in the Santa Cecilia hall with the elliptical configuration of loudspeakers represented such a classic situation. Developing a spatialization concept for the foyer and its corridors was a particular challenge, as there were no areas that could be regarded as central listening positions. Therefore, a multiplicity of listening perspectives had to be considered. In order to organize these spaces, a hierarchy was established between three main zones (defined as poles and situated in the larger spaces leading to the cloakrooms) and secondary zones in the adjacent corridor areas. Physically they were differentiated by full-range diffusion systems (for details see below) as poles and chains of small speakers (rays) reaching into the corridors. The configurations were slightly asymmetrical (as shown in fig. 2), following the architectural structure. In the poles, the acoustical image created by the spatialization was intended to remain close to the original properties of the compositions, whereas following the rays into the corridors, the listener should perceive a more and more fragmentary, but always musically meaningful, acoustical image. To achieve this, a new series of algorithms was developed, adding to the existing system the concept of expansion and contraction of ranges of speakers. Thus, instead of the neat perception of activation/deactivation of single loudspeakers, there was more the idea of sonic centers continuously moving along the rays of loudspeakers. In the arrangement of the compositions for this particular orchestra of loudspeakers there was the problem of obtaining a polyphony of sound layers from pieces that were available only in mixed-down stereo (or even mono) versions. In general, two types of segmentation were used: one in the time domain (assigning successive events to different spatialization engines) and the other in the frequency domain (assigning different parts of the spectrum, carefully extracted by filtering, to the various engines). Studio experimentation led to the conclusion that in both cases, floating transitions between these spatialized segments were most suitable for the overall polyphonic impression, sometimes by even simply superimposing two distinct spatializations of the same material.

Proceedings of the XIV Colloquium on Musical Informatics (XIV CIM 2003), Firenze, Italy, May 8-9-10, 2003

In the Renzo Piano exhibition and in the outside area the use of the spatialization was less geometrical. Instead of chains of loudspeakers there were only scattered distributions, where different listening zones were predominantly covered by single loudspeakers. This led to a different segmentation of the original material and to a different choice of the musical excerpts and of their temporal organization. In the exhibition area the installation was mostly based on slow passages among the sound layers and on slow transitions between loudspeakers; whereas, on the outside, the musical excerpts used were quite short, with surprising spatialization, giving just a taste of what happened in the interior of the architecture.

3. THE TECHNOLOGICAL REALIZATION Both the audio setups for the Santa Cecilia hall and for the foyer/outside area were based on the combination of two computers and a digital mixer: one computer with a ProTools system and another with a Max/MSP environment (with MOTU 2408 interface), interacting with a mixer from the Yamaha 02R series. The first computer was basically used as a multi-track system to organize the formal structure of compositions, to extract different layers and to assign them to the various spatialization engines (implemented in Max/MSP) of the second computer or (statically) to certain loudspeakers of the foyer and outside areas. The ProTools station was also used to control Max/MSP. Using MIDI communication, it was possible to specify the types and the parameters of the spatialization movements; there were up to four spatialization engines in parallel, routing each input line to a maximum of eight loudspeakers. For the Santa Cecilia hall, with its eight-point ellipse of loudspeakers (d&b F1220), the described system was already sufficient. The foyer and the outside area were much more complex, especially because of the high number of speakers involved. For the foyer a total of 42 speakers were used, divided into three zones. In each zone there were four speakers (d&b E3) with two sub-woofers (d&b E18-SUB) for the stereo diffusion of the pieces (the abovementioned poles) and eight speakers (d&b E3) for the spatialization (the rays). In the outside area eight speakers (d&b C6) were placed in four different locations, each pair very far from the others. In these cases, the large distances caused several problems as far as cabling was concerned: therefore, a wireless system was used to connect some of them. Fig. 3: Technical diagram of the system setup (foyer and outside area)

The management of the huge amount of independent audio lines (37) was the most challenging technical aspect of the installation. An independent control of the equalization of all lines was absolutely needed in order to adjust the sound to particular parts of the architecture that were not specifically conceived for music. Furthermore, there was the need to control the loudness levels separately, as during the days of the inauguration there were other performances, so that sometimes certain areas had to be closed and successively re-opened. Lastly, the routing to two different reverberation units had to be controllable. The first one was used for the rays of speakers, that were hanging from ceiling of the foyer (as they were quite close to the audience, a small reverberation was useful to slightly soften the sound movements), whereas the second one was sometimes used in the external signal lines for special audio effects. In order to fulfil these technical requirements, two digital mixing engines (Yamaha DME32 with six D/A converters) were connected to the main 02R mixer (eight output channels of the spatialization, stereo output, outside signals), providing a sufficient number of output lines with their relative equalizations. By using the two DME32 mixing engines, MIDI messages from the ProTools stations could be utilized to dynamically change their internal routing and configurations, while the level of each area could be manually adjusted with a separate MIDI controller.

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Proceedings of the XIV Colloquium on Musical Informatics (XIV CIM 2003), Firenze, Italy, May 8-9-10, 2003

Fig. 4: Detail of one of the rays in the foyer

The setup was completed with a hardware sampler used to reproduce certain events (gonglike samples) that were musically separating the various excerpts of the compositions. It was again triggered by the ProTools station via MIDI messages. The last technical aspect to mention concerns the exhibition area, which was quite simple to solve. In fact, a ProTools system (with a Digi001 card) was routed directly to ten loudspeakers (d&b E3) through a Yamaha 03D digital mixer.

architecture (in continuous transformation because of the final rush of the building works) and with the acoustic rendering of spaces. Such a situation caused a series of reconfigurations both from the musical and technical point of view. The idea of adapting electronic music to a new context was also interesting in the framework of these two days, celebrating the opening of a space for all kinds of music. Symphony orchestras, jazz ensembles, military bands, chamber music groups and vocalists performed mainly in the concert halls, with some extra events in other places of the auditorium. But the mobility of electronic sound offered a starting point for dynamic investigations and discoveries of the various parts of this extraordinary contemporary architecture, emphasizing how this kind of music is challenging the traditional boundaries of concert halls. In this way the installation became a special tribute to that repertoire.

5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors would like to thank the following people who contributed to the practical realization of the installation: Susanna Scarabicchi and Massimo Alvisi of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Francesca Via of the supervision staff of building works, Fabio Fassone and Vincenzo Cavaliere of the local organization staff, Piergiorgio Cavallari as production assistant of Tempo Reale and the staff of BH-audio as technical reference.

4. CONCLUSIONS After the planning phase of the work at the Tempo Reale studios, the operative steps of the project took one week of work on site, interacting with the real environment of the

Fig. 5: The auditorium cavea CIM-4