XNL Musica: four rooms for electronic music and jazz, opened by Ryoichi Kurokawa

On 3 May 2024 XNL Piacenza, the centre for contemporary art, cinema, theatre and music of the Fondazione di Piacenza e Vigevano, opened its Music section: the spaces of the Nicolini Conservatory’s Department of Electronic Music and Jazz, on level -1 of the building in via Santa Franca.

We directed the XNL Musica project, from spring 2023 to November 2024. The rooms are by Boxy System, who built and installed them.

How it started

We began with an acoustic study of the spaces. Then we wrote the tests, written and oral, for the companies taking part in the tender, to get the best product on the market, tailored to the Conservatory’s needs. There were two models: the B-ear modular rooms of the Milan Conservatory, for individual practice, and the loudspeaker layout of the hall of the Genoa Conservatory, for ambisonic listening. We designed the spaces and fittings together with the Boxy System team, and the rooms were ready at the start of 2024.

The Ambisonic Room is, as far as we know, the only modular ambisonic room purpose-built in Italy. Then we fitted out the spaces, configured every device, hardware and software, and designed the fibre link and the Dante audio network joining XNL Musica to the Conservatory.

Four rooms, four jobs

All of them have acoustic treatment with a natural, comfortable response, and all of them can be used for more than one thing. But each has its own job:

• the Ambisonic Room is made for listening to, recording and studying sound in space: sixteen loudspeakers arranged in a sphere carry it 360 degrees around the listener;
• the Electronic Room is a control room: listening, post-production, and recording what is played in the other rooms;
• the Jazz Room is for jazz lessons and practice;
• the Hall is the room for ensemble music, and the place where the others meet for research and production.

The opening night

At 6:30 pm the ribbon was cut by the president of the Fondazione di Piacenza e Vigevano Roberto Reggi, the president of the Conservatory Massimo Trespidi, the director of the Conservatory and of XNL Musica Maria Grazia Petrali and the mayor of Piacenza Katia Tarasconi. Then came the presentation of the spaces and, at 8:30 pm, a musical video mapping on the façade of XNL by the Department of Electronic Music.

At 9 pm, in the auditorium on the second floor, Ryoichi Kurokawa (Osaka, 1978), in Piacenza for the first time, played the concert version of “s.asmbli / subassemblies”. Its material is laser scans of architecture, ruins and nature, broken down and rebuilt as subsets, between order and disorder. In the hall, a single screen, surround lighting and 4.1 audio. The 350 seats sold out in three days, with an audience from all over Italy.

The next day, Saturday 4 May, the rooms were open to the public from 10 am to 6 pm, with sound installations by the Conservatory’s students and teachers.

“With XNL Musica we complete a Centre that serves the city, the people who enjoy the arts and the training of young people.”

Roberto Reggi, president of the Fondazione di Piacenza e Vigevano

After the opening

At the end of June 2024 the new technologies departments closed the year with the Festival MusicMediale, partly in the XNL Musica spaces. In the autumn, before the new academic year, we designed and installed three more B-ear rooms, for sound design, podcasts and rehearsals, with automated, secured access run by software designed together with Mude s.r.l.

The same year saw the first collaboration between XNL Musica and XNL Arte: for the exhibition of the artist Valentina Furian, coordinated by Paola Nicolin and Gianmarco, the Conservatory handled the installation’s acoustic production, and the students of the Sound Engineering master’s course worked on it.

Since 2025 the Conservatory has entrusted us with the coordination, supervision and technology development of XNL Musica, for three years.

Since then

XNL Musica is also our lab with the Conservatory. It is where the theatres of The Four Turandot are rebuilt in three dimensions, where we recorded the voices of the Piacenza Podcast Academy, and where the sound path of Oltre le nuvole was born. In September 2025, with XNL Arte and XNL Cinema e Teatro, Gianmarco coordinated the fourth edition of XNL Aperto.

It was covered, among others, by il Piacenza, Libertà and il Nuovo Giornale, in Italian.

In the press

The clippings are in Italian.

Cover photo: Daniele Signaroldi for XNL Piacenza.