The dozens of patrons are hunched over their tables, scribbling furiously. Aside from a few whispers and giggles, there's hardly any noise.

There's certainly testing going on — but it's more of a social than academic nature. Look at the notes the patrons are writing to one another, and you'll see the same conversations you see in any hip bar on any Saturday night.

"You caught my eye and you have a pretty smile," says one. "Do I know you from a past life?" says another.

This is a "Quiet Party" — a mixer where the conversation takes place on paper rather than in the air. Organizers say they started it for those frustrated by the din of a night on the town — the loud music, the yelling, the cell phones.

But the Quiet Party is only one of the many unusual inventions of modern matchmakers. Online dating may have lost its stigma, but today's singles are finding even more unusual ways to meet their mate.

Love in Eight Minutes

One of the best known of these phenomena is 8minutedating, a mixer in which potential partners are paired off, and then given just eight minutes to get to know one another before each is moved on to another prospect.

The participants see eight of these dates in an evening, and after the event, they can log on to a Web site to rate their experiences and see if a match occurred.

Begun in 2001, 8minutedating has gotten so popular that it is now in more than 70 cities, including locations in Canada and the United Kingdom, and can boast 80,000 customers. The event has even been a subject on such hit shows as Frasier and Sex and the City.

And 8minutedating is far from the only form of speed dating out there. It has rivals for attention in similarly named programs like Hurrydate, Predating and DateDate.

The mixers have been billed as a way for time-pressed single professionals to meet mates, but like the Quiet Party, they also appeal to those frustrated by the usual nightlife options.

"Bars are not really set up for facilitating interaction, making it easy to meet other people — especially of the opposite sex," said Tom Jaffee, the founder of 8minutedating.

It takes an aggressive sort to meet people in a bar, he said — and that sort is not necessarily the type a person wants to meet.

It even beats using the Internet personals, says Richard Schwartz, who is now engaged to someone he met through 8minutedating.

Internet dating requires participants to jump through too many hoops in order to meet someone, he said. "You have to e-mail awhile, then talk a few times on the phone before you finally get to meet.

"This method allows you to go, sit and talk and instantly you can tell if you like someone or not," he said. "It's just a fabulous method."

Keys to a Heart

Another mixer that's gaining popularity is the Lock and Key Encounter, where each male participant is given a key, and each female participant a lock, and everyone looks for a match.

If participants find a match — that is, if the man's key unlocks the woman's lock — they both are entered into a drawing for a prize. Then they get new hardware to try for another drawing.

The game gives singles a reason to speak to one another, instead of just angling for a date, said co-founder Andrea Martin.

"You can just be playing the game or really meeting people," she said. "Shy or outgoing, you have a reason to go up to people."

And like speed dating, the lock and key parties are also gaining popularity. In less than a year, the program has spread to nine cities, with each event always drawing more than 100 people, Martin said.

Even online matchmaking has gone to the next level. For many tech-savvy singles, the personal ads on sites like Match.com and Nerve.com aren't good enough anymore.

The latest phenomenon is Friendster, a site that only lets people who are friends of friends see each other's profiles. You start off by inviting friends to the network, and they invite their friends, and pretty soon you have access to lots of profiles — and at least you know you have a friend in common.

Friendster founder and CEO Jonathan Abrams said he founded the site because he found the other sites "kind of creepy." So he invented a Web site where you could meet people through your friends.

Love in the Time of ATMs

Few people are surprised that these matchmaking phenomena were proliferating. As modern life has become more self-centered, traditional means of courtship seem to be going the way of the family dinner.

"Generations in the past lived in the city where they grew up, where they had friends and family and could cast a wider network," Jaffe said. Today, people are more transient, moving for work, and their jobs are more demanding.

Martin tells what she says is a familiar tale, living a socially busy life until college graduation, when she left her circle of friends and went to work in a new city, and found herself nearly alone.

"I had one friend here, one friend there. I was used to having plans every weekend," she said.

With modern technology, such as ATMs and automated toll booths, people today generally have fewer opportunities to interact with one another. "In typical life there's not a lot of opportunity to interact with people, to sit down and talk to people," Jaffee said.

But Robin Gorman Newman, a "love coach" who advises clients on romantic matters, says another symptom of modernity is probably to blame. "To me, a lot of it has to do with people wanting a quick fix," she said.

She conceded there is a trend, but these programs wouldn't revolutionize dating, she said. "It doesn't take the place of other activities."

Hedda Muskat, author of the book Dating, also dismissed the new mixers, calling them a "gimmick."

"It's knocked out the whole notion of dating, which is romance," she said. She compared it to teenagers hanging out in the basement of a friend's house, meeting friends of friends.

She predicted they would disappear in a few years, but acknowledged the trends that had brought them about.

The next step of socializing will probably involve certain establishments integrating online matchmaking, she said, using as an example a hotel in San Francisco that allows guests to browse profiles of other guests and ask for a setup.

Dating hasn't changed, and don't expect it to change, she said. "None of this stuff will ever replace the traditional forms of dating from the 1900s, like eye contact and flirtation."

The Write Way to Amore?

Organizers have faith, though. It's not a passing fad, said Jaffee. "It's a return to what people like to do, sit down and engage in conversation."

"Single used to be people in their 20s. Sex and the City showed women in their 30s. It's getting older, that group of singles. People are getting more independent," Martin said.

People in their 40s, 50s and 60s, coming out of divorces and looking for new love, are getting picky. "They don't want to make the same mistake twice," she said.

Jaffee also notes that the 8minutedating parties attract more women than men — and where the women are, men will follow.

Even the doubting love coach admits, "Any organized outing is more popular with women. Most single guys out there don't commit — they don't even commit to the night."

At the Quiet Party, the sex ratios seem to be pretty even — but all other societal forces seem to be in full effect.

Jason Snell, a well-dressed 30-year-old lawyer, says he's glad he attended the party. "There no stigmatism, like when you approach someone in a bar and it's cheesy."

He says he came on a lark with his friend Casey Schaeffer, 26, an attractive television producer. She's also positive about the experience. "I thought it was going to be much worse than it was," she jokes.

Lisa France, a 30-something stuntwoman who has doubled for actresses from Lorraine Bracco to Sean Young, says she approached people with a line that works better on paper than in person: "Tell me something that will make me raise my eyebrows."

She's glad she did. "It's kind of cute as long as you can laugh at yourself," she says.

However, new ways of communicating romantically can also bring new types of creepy behavior, as anyone on the Internet can tell you.

At the bar, one man passes a card to a woman — and it happens to have a few inappropriate remarks. She breaks the silence with a few well-chosen expletives, and he leaves — alone.

"Some people will write things they would never say," France says.