At the beginning of 2002, the Santa Cecilia National Academy asked Tempo Reale to design and realize a large sound installation – conceived by Luciano Berio and dedicated to electronic music – for several locations inside Renzo Piano’s new Auditorium in Rome. It involved four different areas, inside and outside the building: the large semicircular foyer, the outer area around the cavea, the Renzo Piano exhibition area, and the large 2700 concert hall (now “Sala Santa Cecilia”), which at the time was still under construction and was inaugurated separately in December 2002.

Even though there were four areas involved, the installation was musically divided into two parts. The first one lasted one hour (in loop) and included the foyer, the outside area (cavea), and the 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. These algorithms produced 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 François Bayle, John Chowning, Pietro Grossi, Mauricio Kagel, György Ligeti, Bruno Maderna, Bernard Parmegiani, Henri Pousseur, Steve Reich, Jean Claude Risset, Denis Smalley, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Daniel Teruggi.

The second, autonomous part of the installation was located in the 2700 concert hall (the largest hall of the Auditorium) and included fragments from works by Berio (such as Linea and Chants parallèles) and Claude Risset (Sud), used to re-compose a site specific musical structure that also included naturalistic sound materials. This sound installation, that lasted 10 minutes (in loop), was performed with an elliptical configuration of loudspeakers, specifically located to underline the geometry and the huge dimensions of the space.

[Source: Francesco Giomi, Damiano Meacci, Kilian Schwoon, Sound and architecture: An electronic music installation at the new auditorium in Rome, in Proceedings of the XIV Colloquium on Musical Informatics (Florence, Italy, May 8-10, 2003); updated in January 2021 by Luisa Santacesaria with details provided by Francesco Giomi]