Dress Rehearsal (October 2022)

Welcome once again, dear loyal readers, to the Song: Future blog!

The opening day for the song performance draws near! Indeed, by the time you read this, there's a good chance that Lu will already be walking Leeds Industrial Museum's halls, telling her story and listening to yours in kind. Of course what this has meant for us is a frenzied final week of activities from all sides with precious little time to relax, as we work to ensure that the performance in finalised and completely ready to go!

Last Wednesday, we braved the train strikes to descend upon Armley for a full run-through of the performance in situ - the dress rehearsal, if you will. With a group consisting of both museum and university employees - with some half dozen phones of different makes between us - we set about putting the app through its paces. It was a delight to finally see Lu talking to us, and engaging with the museum on our tour around!

Although the experience ran largely smoothly, there were, of course, some technical hiccups along the way. Teething problems are to be expected for any project as bold and innovative as Song: the Future, after all! The issues, although relatively minor - animation problems on some operating systems, smaller screen sizes cropping subtitles and images awkwardly, and so forth - were all noted down to feed back to the development team.

Armed with this exhaustive list of our collective feedback, I gave the team at Megaverse a call, and together we talked through our experiences. Many of our comments came as no surprise to them; they had already observed a number of these issues and were well on course to fixing them. We had also discovered a few novel problems, which they were grateful to us for pointing out. Thankfully, Megaverse found a device in their office that had similar behaviour to ours, and were able to observe them for themselves.

It might seem strange and even counter-intuitive that they were happy to see the same issues as us, but when debugging code reproducibility is a critical pre-requisite to fixing problems. If you can't reliably make the problem appear, how are you to know if you've fixed it?

I left the call confident that the team would be able to get everything fixed and ready for Tuesday's launch.

This confidence was repaid today, when we visited Armley once more to go through the performance's installation, and do one final walk through of the experience. The app worked smoothly and correctly throughout, and the experience as a whole was a joy to behold. The teams at both Human and Megaverse have truly outdone themselves with the final result.

Whilst this has been on-going, the marketing for the Song: Future performance performance has also been kicking off in earnest! Maybe you've already seen one of the posters of flyers advertising it around town? Or heard about the exhibition through our press release? Perhaps you've even visited our Leeds Galleries and Museums website page!

However you've heard about the performance, we can't wait to share it with you. And more importantly, to hear back from you about it! Both during the experience itself and afterwards, through feedback at the museum and online.

It is your experiences and stories that we're here to listen to, explore, and perhaps even recount one day in the future. So don't be shy to tell Lu anything!

I hope to see you all at Armley mills soon!