A School of Continuous Improvement system scores audience laughter per script page in real time, and a community theatre company's play-reading committee has adopted its table-read scores as a binding cut for next season's shortlist.
A mic-and-classifier system built for one amateur company's comedy season now gates which scripts survive to a full rehearsal
A comedy season has always told a producer whether the tickets sold. Whether a given scene actually landed with the room, page by page, has mostly stayed a matter of feel. Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor of the Improvement Grand Rounds in the School of Continuous Improvement, rigged a volunteer amateur-dramatics company’s gallery with a four-microphone array and an audio classifier that timestamps every audible laugh to the script page playing under it, publishing the results as a live Laugh-Density Index the company’s play-reading committee can watch update through a season.
The company has not treated the index as a curiosity, and neither has the School: the result extends the Adaptive Metrics Lab’s evaluation-ecosystem agenda into a domain it had not yet reached, the volunteer stage. Any script scoring below the median band at its own table-read workshop is now excluded from the following season’s shortlist before it reaches a full rehearsal, and the cut carries no appeal once the workshop closes. Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor of the Living Dashboard, helped build the scoring pipeline the committee now defers to.
A workshop read and a staged night rarely score a scene the same way, and the company has decided to act on the earlier number anyway. That’s the part worth building an index around.
— Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds, School of Continuous Improvement
“The dashboard was built to describe a season, not to run one,” said Dr Marit Osayande. “What the committee does with the description is its own decision, and it keeps making the same one.”
The full research poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.e5esfg.