Those of you who tuned in to our Act of Remembrance this week may have noticed that the two minutes silence lasted somewhat longer than expected.
What happened?
Whenever we can’t get a live bugler to play at our Act of Remembrance, we play a pre-recorded audio file which contains the Last Post, two minutes silence, and Reveille as a single audio track. Unfortunately, playback was stopped immediately after the end of the Last Post and we didn’t have either the capability to resume playback from the same point, nor the ability to signal to the president that a technical problem had occurred and they should continue with the prayer at the end of the silence instead of expecting the Reveille.
Why did this happen?
An unexpected artefact in the audio caused our technician at the War Memorial to stop playback early, suspecting a technical fault which would have disrupted the two minutes silence. Unfortunately they did not anticipate being unable to resume the playback.
Since we have never experienced this particular problem before, we didn’t have a procedure in place for signalling to the president that the Reveille wasn’t going to play, and that they were safe to continue with the service without interruption.
How are we making sure it doesn’t happen again?
We’re going to try prevent any recurrence in a number of ways:
- Trying to source a live bugler for future services
- Re-cutting our pre-recorded audio to make sure it doesn’t have any unexpected artefacts
- Having a ‘backup’ audio file of just the Reveille, allowing our technicians to manually resume playback at the appropriate point