Build II — Polish
Feature freeze at 10:00. Today is not for more — it is for better: playability tuning, sound design, the instrument's face, its documentation, and a real soundcheck. Tomorrow you perform.
- your instrument passes the 30-second stranger test — verified, not assumed
- it works on at least one Android and one iOS phone
- documentation is drafted: video shot, writeup started, every fact stamped
- you have soundchecked and know your slot in tomorrow's running order
10:00 — Feature Freeze, Then Tuning
The Day 7 spec named your cut-line; this is the morning you honour it. Whatever doesn't work at 10:00 gets fixed or cut — nothing new gets added. Then tune, against the Day 6 checklist, in this order:
- Immediacy — any perceptible lag between gesture and sound?
Hunt it down (usually: heavy work inside
draw(), or an attack envelope slower than you think). - Ranges — do the extremes of every mapping sound
good? A theremin that can screech at 8 kHz will, in a stranger's
hands, only screech. Clamp with
constrain(); taste is mostly range-setting. - Silence — does the instrument stop cleanly when hands leave? Clicks on release are envelope problems: give every stop a few milliseconds of fade.
- Loudness — level-match against the other five projects; soundcheck will confirm through the monitors.
12:00 — Cross-Testing
Swap phones around the room until every instrument has run on at least one Android and one iOS device — the eels differ per platform, and better to meet them today than at 15:00 tomorrow. Then the harder swap: trade instruments and say nothing. Watch a colleague meet yours cold. Ninety seconds. That is the 30-second-stranger test with a stopwatch on it; what confuses them gets one fix each, this afternoon.
14:00 — Documentation (Half of A3)
- The live URL — the instrument itself, deployed and public. The lasting artifact: the workshop ends, the URL doesn't.
- A short video (60–120s) — phone-shot is fine: hands, screen, and sound, showing the mapping legibly. Shooting-brief: film in the quietest twenty minutes you can find, real audio, no music bed over the instrument.
- One page — the instrument's name; the "you ______, it ______" sentence; the final mapping table (as built, not as dreamed); what changed since concept lock and why; what you'd build in week three.
- Timestamps throughout, per the house rule: when recorded, when shot, when deployed — to the minute where known. Your daily log sentences from Days 8–9 slot straight in here.
15:30 — QR Posters
One A4 per instrument for the show's wall: the instrument's name, the players, and a large QR to the live URL — made with the QR tool (it has a print button). The audience plays your instrument on their own phones minutes after seeing it performed. Design the poster like it belongs to the instrument — same face, same type spirit.
16:00 — Soundcheck and Running Order
- Cabled acts: phone → 3.5mm/USB-C dongle → mixer → monitors. Set gain per act; mark levels; note who needs which dongle and tape it to the running order.
- Speaker acts (distributed/ensemble pieces): position the phones in the room, walk the audience path, listen from where they'll sit — six phone speakers around a room is a spatial instrument no mixer gives you.
- Running order by 16:45, printed: act, players, cable or speakers, one-line intro, who resets the room after. Ensemble piece — if the cohort has one — closes.
Finish the one-pager. Charge the phone. Charge the backup phone. Do not refactor anything after 21:00 — tonight's clever idea is tomorrow's silent instrument, and the version that works is the version that performs.