Oriental: a concert at Expo 2025 Osaka, to listen to from the inside
The orchestras of Italy’s conservatories filmed in Japan in 360°, with immersive audio. And a player we wrote ourselves to choose what to listen to, down to a single instrument.
In the summer of 2025 the Nicolini Conservatory flew to Expo 2025 Osaka, and we went with it. The project is called Oriental — in full, OPEN Cultural: Oriental Partnership for Educational Needs in Cultural — and it is financed by Italy’s EU-funded recovery plan (PNRR) to take Italian conservatories abroad: it is led by the «Ottorino Respighi» Conservatory of Latina, with the conservatories of Milan, Palermo and Piacenza and the Istituto Pantheon in Rome. On behalf of the Nicolini, GR Studio has scientific responsibility for it: project direction, coordination of live events and production, a programme of research and tests with the partners.
The project has its own website, which we made: Oriental, where you can listen to the Osaka concert from the inside and find the names of those who played.
The filming
The national orchestras of Italy’s conservatories performed in Osaka: the jazz orchestra on 20 and 21 August 2025 at the Arena Matsuri, the symphony orchestra on 11 October in the National Day Hall. We handled the audiovisual production and the streaming of the concerts, jazz and symphonic. The two concerts by the Orchestra Nazionale Jazz dei Conservatori Italiani (ONJ), the national jazz orchestra of Italy’s conservatories, were streamed in 360° with immersive audio, using a capture and streaming technique developed at the Nicolini. The concert by the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale dei Conservatori, conducted by Gianna Fratta, was filmed in 360° too.
On stage there were three things that are not usually there:
- an Ambisonics recording, which keeps the direction each sound comes from;
- a microphone system with a high number of capsules, so that listening can be “pointed” afterwards too;
- an Insta360 Titan camera, which films in 360° at 11K.
The player
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. So we wrote our own software. It started from HOAST360, the open-source platform by IEM Graz for 360° video with Ambisonics audio, and we developed it until it became something else: a player that works on computers and phones, in which the viewer moves the point of view and chooses an area of the scene to listen to. The focus can be narrowed until it isolates a section, an instrument, a voice from the rest of the orchestra.
Two experiences are published on the platform:
You need a connection and a recent browser; what you can do depends on the device.
Where it is going
Oriental closes at the end of 2026. With The Four Turandot it shares the lab, the tools and the underlying idea: to step inside the music, instead of watching it from outside.
In the press
On 14 April 2026 Libertà, the Piacenza daily, described Oriental as “a revolutionary software to ‘step inside’ the orchestra and isolate single instruments”. The clipping is in Italian.
The photos are frames from our 360° filming, straightened out.
