Page "Laugh track" Paragraph 7

In 1953, Douglass began to extract laughter, applause, and other reactions ( including people moving around in their seats ) from live soundtracks recorded ( mainly from the pantomime segments of The Red Skelton Show ), and then placed the recorded sounds into a huge tape machine.

This basic concept would later be reworked as the Chamberlin Music Master, which was succeeded by the Mellotron.