. Ladies and gentlemen, this is your call to take places for performance. Places, places, places.

Okay, they're ready for you. Good luck. Thank you. Your heart is racing. The adrenaline is flowing. This is your moment. It's time to conquer your nerves, face the crowd, and let all that practice pay off.

Sweeter than Roses.

Some say it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert. For Josephine Shore, this performance is part of that journey as she blows our socks off with a rendition of Sweeter Than Roses to a very unusual audience.

I've always loved singing. My parents say I was a bit of an annoying child growing up. I was making lots of weird noises, and apparently would have myself to sleep. So eventually, they were like, Let's put this into something useful. And It's got me some singing lessons.

Talk to me about nerves. Do you get them? And how do you get over them?

Yeah, I get nerves all the time. Getting over them, it's always a tricky balance. Sometimes the adrenaline helps you, but also you don't want the nerves to affect your singing or your technique. If getting all tense.

Researchers here at the Royal College of Music in London say that practicing and then performing is very different to practicing performing. Filming. And so while it's difficult to get regular access to the real theaters and venues, they can simulate the experience here in their performance laboratory. And that simulation begins before they step out into the lights.

One of the things we learned from our research is that our body's stress response to performance can be as, if not more powerful backstage than it is on stage. It's that anticipation of performance where anxiety can really hit. And This helps us tailor our training to make sure we're not only preparing them for what happens on stage, under the light, in front of the audience's eyes, but also how they're coping backstage. How do they manage that anxiety? How do they get themselves physically and mentally into a place where they're ready to walk out on stage and give their best performance?

The parallel to that in the surgical world would be allowing surgical students to go through the process of gowning up, washing up, doing a preoperative briefing with their team, and making sure that they're all on the same page.

And once the students are on stage, George Waddell can control everything. He can change the venue, he can change the reaction to make the night go as well or as badly as he wants.

The Performance Laboratory is running in Unreal Engine, the video game software. Each member of the audience is an individual video game's character. They all behave independently, and they don't all always show up. I got lucky tonight. And What's really interesting about this space as well is there are 64 speakers hidden in the walls and ceilings. So if you change the venue, that changes the acoustics, which forces you to change your performance.

Getting that sense of the acoustic makes it not so huge a jump when you're then performing on stage compared to in all the practice rooms we have, which tend to be a much drier sound. When it's suddenly a much bigger space that you have to fill, it's great to get a little bit of an experience of what it might sound like ahead of time.

So there's the prep, there's the lights, there's the sound. But let's talk about that audience. It's a weird crowd in tonight, I can tell you.

We want to test our performers' focus. We want to make sure they can hold it together. So that might be very subtle. A little cough, perhaps. And it might be more dramatic.

The performer is expected to ignore this, I guess.

That's right. Even if there's a momentary lapse, it's about then continuing after that. Performers make mistakes. It's how they react after that mistake that sets apart the professional. For many of our performers, it's not actually this full house that is the most intimidating to them. It's perhaps when the marketing hasn't gone so well. And there are just a rare few in the audience. This can be quite intimidating, trying to bring that energy to a sparse crowd. I've been there. Well, I think we all have, unfortunately.

But this new multi-million-pound performance lab is just part of the work the college has been undertaking to help prepare students for the real thing. Heart rate and breathing monitors measure activity and stress levels, and special glasses can even track the musician's eye movements to find out if they're being distracted mid-performance. They also measure how dilated your pupils are, which can be another indicator of anxiety. Now, it is possible to practice more than just musical performances here. Public speaking, business presentations, the venue and the audience are ready for any type of rehearsal. And then there's this lot. Yes, you can even simulate an audition panel. George can make each of the judges purr like Sharon Osborne or sneer like Simon Cowell. So what are we going to make of this little stand-up routine I knocked up with the help of ChatGPT?

Good evening. How's everyone doing tonight? I mean, have you seen those vocal processes? They can turn a voice that sounds like a dying cat into something that could rival Freddie Mercury. How did it do that?

Thank you. I think we've heard enough. Yeah, I think I'll leave it to the experts.

Me.