Methods for measuring audience reactions

This paper describes recent developments in our investigations into psychological reactions of audience members as they watch live performance, specifically contemporary dance. The first method, developed by Glass [5,6], is a new psychometric instrument ‐ the Audience Response Tool (ART) ‐ that records emotional and cognitive responses in the form of qualitative open-ended descriptions and quantitative ratings to live performance. The second method ‐ the portable Audience Response Facility (pARF) ‐ is a programmable, hand-held PC that samples one- or two-dimensional data continuously as a performance unfolds. A third method records eye movements of novice and expert observers as they watch a pre-recorded performance. The ART was developed in the context of an experimental design that investigated the effect of pre-performance information sessions (generic, specific, no information-control group) on cognitive and emotional responses to two new Australian dance works, Anna Smith's Red Rain and Sue Healey's Fine Line Terrain. The pARF has been used to record continuous responses from 19 audience members in the Playhouse Theatre in Canberra as they watched the Quantum Leap Youth Choreographic Ensemble perform Albert David’s Silent Heartbeat. Judged emotional expression in the 30 minute work was captured in two orthogonal dimensions, valence and arousal [13]. The pARF revealed an increase in arousal as the work progressed, explicable in terms of music and movement intensity and tempo. The eye movement experiment investigated effects of observer expertise on fixation duration and saccadic amplitude while four dance experts and four novices watched a five-minute dance film, Sue Healey's 13 and 32. Expert observers relative to novices recorded shorter fixations and larger saccades. This effect has been interpreted in light of organizational strategies and expectancies acquired by experts through experience with a particular art form. The qualitative and quantitative methods have wide application across the performing arts, film, and digital media.