DUBAI, UAE – The UN’s 2023 Climate Change Conference, a.k.a. COP28 UAE, welcomed more than 70,000 dignitaries and accredited visitors from around the world to Dubai’s Expo City along with 400,000 more who were granted access to the surrounding “blue zone” during the event. The event began on Nov. 30 and wraps up on Dec. 12.
Starting in September, PRG was called in to design a sound system for the 1,000+ seat Al Waha Theatre, an elliptical space with a 360° screen that surrounds it. Dom Di Tommaso, an Italian audio engineer affiliated with PRG Audio and Earth Group Ltd., has been mixing the audio for most of the events within Pro Tools, through a DiGiCo SD7 Quantum and an L-Acoustics speaker system with L-ISA allowing for immersive listening experiences.
“The opening ceremony was a spectacular show with live indigenous drummers and fully immersive settings of nature,” noted Di Tommaso, who has supported events in the UK and Europe for more than 20 years. He shared details about the setup at the Al Waha Theatre with FRONT of HOUSE via email while the event was still under way. “One in particular called the Desert felt like being in the Arabian desert, with a dark and starry sky, surrounded by the sound of the winds and nocturnal birds.”
The Sound System
To optimize the audio, PRG deployed a sound system that starts with an L-C-R speaker setup that also includes flush mounted speakers along the 360° screen and subwoofers for low-end rumble. The configuration started with L-R hangs of nine L-Acoustics Kara enclosures each, along with a center cluster of four Kara elements. The flush mounted screen speakers were 12 L-Acoustics Syva and Syva Low elements, with a sub array of six L-Acoustics SB28s at the back of stage. “The whole system has been fine-tuned to match tonality as much as possible,” Di Tommaso said.
For the Opening Ceremony and for looping introductory 360° AV shows that help set the tone for speeches and sessions taking place each day, Di Tommaso provided immersive audio with technologies that tightly integrate the recorded imagery with 3D sound. The looping immersive AV content included environmental scenery ranging from mountain rainstorms to a glacier with waves and the sound of cracking ice to imagery and sounds of wind turbines and whales.
The same system was used for the speeches themselves. “The LCR System is worked out as an L-ISA Group out of the full surround soundscape,” Di Tommaso noted, adding that the audio “is placed physically like a stereo plus C system, and it’s composed of Kara clusters instead of Syvas for more vertical coverage. This is also because we can’t afford high SPLs, and coverage is more important for talks events.”
Apart from the Reaching the Last Mile event that made use of the venue on day three of the conference, which Di Tommaso described, technically, as a “fully produced awards show,” he was directly involved in automating and mixing in ProTools (PT) all the immersive audio. “The PT audio was mainly orchestrations statically panned around the room with overlaid moving sounds, in particular fast ‘swooshes’ around the room with significant low end content to accompany dramatic walk-ups and awards announcements.”
The Deep Dive
Di Tommaso worked with various content producers on the immersive AV presentations. “They’ve been provided with two templates I’ve built, one for the PT [Pro Tools] session and one for the L-ISA Controller session. The PT Session was loaded with the L-ISA plugin on every channel and ready to communicate with the L-ISA Controller, including getting MTC [MIDI Timecode] from PT.”
Di Tommaso noted that “the complex nature of these shows has been a challenge, and I had to create a master PT session of 10 hours, with roughly one hour of TC dedicated to each day of show.” He also programmed the automation for each individual multitrack session imported into the master PT Session, which involved an 11-hour timeline, noting that “the multi-tracks are mainly triggered at the established location by the d3.” The DiGiCo SD7 Quantum console “mixes everything,” Di Tommaso added, including all signals from the stage and PT, and manages all sends to stage monitors, [L-Acoustics] 5XTs, in ears, broadcast and streaming.
“As per any L-ISA setup, we have directed out the channels needed from the PT session out on MADI streams to the L-ISA processors,” he said. “For the speeches, I have created matrixes on the desk to feed the LCR system and, eventually, the surround in pairs. The L-ISA rig is based on two processor one, one main and one back up fed by splitter converters MADI Coax to Optical, then out of the processors into Optocore X6R FX AES to convert MADI optical to AES.” The signal from ProTools “are managed through a Dante Network.”
A Two-Way Signal Flow
Di Tommaso noted that the networking and timecode setup not only tightly integrated all the audio and visual technologies in use, it was able to work in either direction. “The TC infrastructure we’ve put in place allows us to both fire from PT or, in the opposite direction, from d3. In the first case, PT outputs a LTC track to the [DiGiCo] SD7 Quantum, locally out to the grandMA lighting console and out of the SD Rack at back of house into a Rosendahl Mif4, then into the d3 Server; this way, ProTools triggers video and lights.
“When we need video world to trigger ProTools and lights, d3 outputs its LTC track embedded in their sessions into the SD Rack to FOH local outputs,” Di Tommaso added. “The LTC this way is fed to lights again in the same way – just XLR into the grandMA – and into the ProTools machines (main and backup) through a little audio interface (an SSL 2 from Solid State Logic).
“The LTC audio is converted to MTC with a little piece of software called Lockstep, which is great,” Di Tommaso continued. “It just works, and it’s free to download and use. The L-ISA Controller picks up the MTC from a local network we have set up through a Luminex 26i Ethernet switch, fed from the ProTools machine, that in this case received from Lockstep and Generate to the local network.”
Di Tommaso called the sync “super stable both ways,” adding that it “allows us to be flexible in terms of the structure of sessions and related content,” noting that AES signal is then sent to the LA8 amplifiers in the P.A. amp racks. “The P.A. is treated as a full surround, as mentioned, but composed of two types of speakers,” optimizing the listening experience for different events within the venue.
The whole system is set up to full redundancy for each device in the chain.
A Consequential – and Controversial – Event
U.S. president Joe Biden did not make an appearance at the two-week COP28 summit, which coincided with the conflict between Israel and Hamas and White House efforts to press for a pause in the fighting that would allow for the release of hostages. And Pope Francis, who had planned to attend, had to cancel his trip due to health concerns.
Even so, the event was hugely consequential, generating headlines around the world along with protests and controversy, with social media critics likening COP28 UAE president Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who is also CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), to “Count Dracula in charge at the Blood Bank.”
Despite the criticism, Al Jaber led a Dec. 5 event from the COP28 Al Waha Theatre that formally announced Global Cooling Pledge backed by a 63-nation coalition. Other noted advances included the creation of a World Bank-administered “loss and damage” fund, a renewed focus on the potential benefits of sharply curbing methane emissions, and King Charles III’s warning that humanity remains “dreadfully off track” global warming targets including the 2015 Paris Accords.
For the Dec. 5 Global Cooling Pledge announcement from the Al Waha Theatre, Al Jaber was joined by UNEP director Inger Andersen, John Kerry from the U.S., and Kerry’s diplomatic counterparts from many of the other 62 countries attended and spoke at that event. Together they focused on a collective pledge to curb planet-warming emissions arising from to air conditioning and refrigeration, establishing a target that all these emissions not only be capped, but reduced by about one-third of their current levels by 2050.
But the biggest surprise was yet to come – the day after the conference concluded. On Dec. 13, Al Jaber announced a final compromise agreement among diplomats from the nearly 200 countries at the event. It called on all nations to transition away from fossil fuels and “achieve net zero by 2050.” COP28 UAE, held in a petroleum-dependent country and led by an oil executive, turned out to be the first in the history of COP summits to specifically cite the need to shift from fossil fuels, sharply cut methane emissions while also tripling renewable energy from sources like wind and solar power by 2030.
