EVENT FOCUS
5G FESTIVAL At the tail end of 2021, live events specialists gathered in separate locations across England for the third test of the 5G Festival project. The goal; to have band members performing in remote locations online, mixed in real-time at Metropolis Studios and sent 60 miles to Brighton Dome, producing a seamless live performance with an in-person audience.
Words: Stew Hume Photos: Jamie MacMillan
The 5G Festival project is arguably one of the most quintessential post-lockdown stories covered in TPi since March 2020. A band performing together, online in real time, and then mixed in a custom built Dolby Atmos studio, with the intention of streaming to an in-person audience, and viewers at home. Along with showing how far networking has come, this project challenged the general conventions of a live concert as it offered a solution to allowing greater access for audiences to enjoy music in multiple locations. The concept has been led by Digital Catapult, one of the UK’s leading advanced digital technology centres and 5G specialists, pulling in several supporters such as Audiotonix, Sonosphere and Mativision to work in collaboration with Brighton Dome and Brighton Festival, along with telecommunications service provider and sponsor, Virgin Media O2. Digital Catapult CEO, Jeremy Silver outlined the goals of the project: “As live performers have been totally prevented from working because of the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of bright minds have been focused on how to create exciting alternative experiences for a
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virtual world,” he tweeted. “The result of this work was an exciting bid into the 5GCreate competition to produce a virtual festival that could offer 5G enabled experiences in which performers could reach audiences in a new way. We’re thrilled now to be able to bring the 5G Festival to life, working with leading venues, organisations and artists to push forward with the next evolution of entertainment.” With two other successful trials, the 5G Festival team joined forces at the end of November in advance of next year’s main event. For this final test, experienced session musicians J. Appiah, Mitch Jones, Henty Guy and Smiley Wade were set up in two different locations, each with Nreal AR glasses and a screen to view other musicians. With no click track, it was imperative that the band could play in time with one another as if they were in the same room, a feat that the 5G team seem to have remarkably achieved. As TPi sat in the control room and drummer Smiley Wade smashed through the set list, it was hard to believe that he was watching and listening in real time to a number of other musicians playing miles away. Audiotonix’s Dan Page demystified some of the audio wizardry.
At each stage of the audio chain there were a number of products from the Audiotonix Group with each player using a KLANG:kontroller to monitor their own IEM mix, a DiGiCo S21 that took the musicians feed and sending it to a Calrec Audio box via the AES67 network. Each of the musicians’ feeds were then sent to the mixing room in Metropolis Studios where engineer Phil Wright created a fully immersive Dolby Atmos mix of the performance. “There were several different workflows at play here,” explained Page. “We’re sending audio from each site to every musician so they can hear one another. Then we have the overall mix which is being put together at Metropolis and then streamed back to Brighton for an inperson crowd to hear the performance.” Page was excited to report that in this latest test the team made significant strides forward in preparation for next year. “We are pushing the audio via the 5G network into some of the venues with the goal being in the final event we’ll be able to transmit audio into a number of venues simultaneously.” He also reported that the feedback for all the musicians involved had been very positive. “It opens a lot of doors for artists who, with this
