LIVEX

LIVEX is the Liveability and Investment Exhibition, staged at ADNEC Abu Dhabi from 29 September to 1 October 2026 by the Department of Municipalities and Transport. It brings government, investors and residents together around a single question: what does it feel like to live here next? We wrote the sound of the answer. One musical idea, built out into a full system of assets, and then carried into the opening film that plays across a screen the width of the room.

An exhibition is not a brand you can hang above a stage. The sound had to feel like Abu Dhabi without turning into a postcard of it, and it had to hold up in places that pull in opposite directions: a leadership film, a fifteen second social outro, the walk-on for a keynote speaker, an hour of background music in an exhibition hall and a gala dinner where the room is talking. Arabic instrumentation was central to the brief and the easiest thing to get wrong, because used as decoration it reads as costume. The calendar was the other constraint. The event date was fixed and the first draft was due within a week of the brief.

We started with the motif rather than the track. A short, singable phrase, simple enough to recognise in three seconds and strong enough to carry a three minute theme, with everything else grown from it. Qanun, oud, ney and piano sit inside a contemporary orchestral and electronic bed, so the region is in the music rather than on top of it, and the theme is built like the event itself: an intimate opening, a gathering rise and a confident peak. From that one piece of DNA came the system. A sonic logo in several textures, fifteen, thirty and sixty second cutdowns, walk-in and walk-out cues that resolve into an underscore so nobody crosses a stage in silence, and an hour of curated Arabesque background music for the halls with the theme surfacing every few tracks. We then scored and sound designed the opening film alongside the director, cutting music, dialogue and effects to a picture made for a three panel screen.

LIVEX has a sound of its own before its first edition opens. The theme was released publicly as “Live What’s Next (LIVEX)” on 26 August 2026 and sits on Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok and YouTube Music, and the event has been running it across its campaign since. One motif now covers the opening film, the stage, the halls and the socials, and it is written to be inherited by the next edition.