# 026 — Cue Pressure

## Problem Situation

Stage managers in complex productions call 200-600 cues per show through a single voice channel — one human speaking warnings and "go" commands over headset to lighting, sound, flies, follow-spots, and automation departments simultaneously. When cues stack during transitions, the calling rate exceeds human verbal bandwidth. The SM can't speak fast enough. Cues fire late, get skipped, or tongue-twist on similar numbers.

The bottleneck is invisible during planning because cue sheets are flat lists — sequential rows that don't show temporal density. A lighting designer adding 15 cues to a 30-second transition doesn't see that sound already has 7 and flies has 3 in the same window. The SM discovers the pile-up during tech rehearsal, under pressure, with no time to redistribute.

Real workarounds include: splitting cue-calling across multiple callers (synchronization risk), putting sequences on auto-follow timers (removes human judgment — fires on an empty stage if an actor is late), or sound engineers going off headset entirely to run from their own cue sheet (fragments coordination).

## What Was Built

A calling bandwidth instrument. A timeline visualization shows cue distribution across five departments (Lighting, Sound, Flies, Spots, Automation) as parallel lanes, with a bandwidth curve below that calculates the SM's calling load — how much vocal time the cues demand vs how much time is available.

Bottleneck zones where calling rate exceeds 100% capacity glow red. Clicking a bottleneck zone shows the exact cue sequence with inter-cue gaps, revealing which gaps are too tight to call (less than 2.5s for a standby + go pair).

Three presets demonstrate different show profiles:
- **Musical** (470 cues, 35 min compressed): 9 bottleneck zones, transitions hitting 350-400% peak — physically impossible to call
- **Straight Play** (337 cues, 90 min): mostly calm, 2 sharp spikes at scene transitions
- **Concert** (2470 cues, 80 min): constant saturation — explains why concerts use MIDI automation, not a human caller

## Why This Form

The problem is temporal bandwidth saturation — too many events through one bottleneck. The form shows temporal density across parallel channels, which is the native shape of the problem. It's not a cue list (too flat), not a Gantt chart (wrong abstraction), not a timer. It's a bandwidth visualizer — it shows where the SM's cognitive and vocal capacity will be exceeded, before they're standing in tech rehearsal discovering it the hard way.

## What's Interesting

The contrast between presets reveals different production archetypes:
- Musicals have sharp, devastating transition spikes surrounded by manageable scenes — the problem is localized but extreme
- Straight plays are smooth with rare, predictable bottlenecks — the SM's job is sustainable
- Concerts are constant overload — the entire show exceeds human calling bandwidth, which is why the industry moved to automated triggers

The bottleneck detail view makes the exact failure point legible: "In this 25-second window, you need 60 seconds of calling time. That's impossible." This is the sentence no cue sheet can say.

## Iterations

v1.1: Refined bottleneck detection — raised threshold to 100% (true overload only), merged nearby zones, filtered out sub-3-second artifacts. Reduced false positives from 30+ to 9 meaningful zones for the musical preset.

## Next Step

Add drag-to-redistribute: let the user move cues between departments or shift their timing, and watch the bandwidth curve respond. This would transform the instrument from diagnostic to actionable — a planning tool that helps designers and SMs smooth bottlenecks before tech week.

## Art Direction Note

Dark editorial. Monochrome with red overload accents. JetBrains Mono for all labels, stats, and technical data. Geist for the title. Canvas-rendered timeline — the visualization is the entire artifact. Minimal chrome, generous negative space between sections.

## Promotion Candidate Read

Maybe. The form-to-problem fit is strong — bandwidth saturation shown as bandwidth saturation. The insight (invisible cognitive overload during transitions) is genuine and the three-preset contrast tells a real story about production archetypes. But the instrument is currently read-only. Needs the drag-to-redistribute interaction to graduate from "you have a problem" to "here's how to fix it." Also needs real cue-sheet import (CSV or MIDI) to be useful beyond demo data.
