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Record W1839595072 · doi:10.21083/csieci.v10i1.3028

‘We Wanted Our Coffee Black’: Public Enemy, Improvisation, and Noise

2015· article· en· W1839595072 on OpenAlexaffvenue
Niel Scobie

Bibliographic record

VenueCritical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation · 2015
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicMusic Technology and Sound Studies
Canadian institutionsCarleton University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsJazzMusicalLyricsAdversaryContext (archaeology)Noise (video)Popular musicImprovisationAestheticsRelation (database)SociologyPsychologyComputer scienceLiteratureVisual artsHistoryArtArtificial intelligence

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In Music and Discourse, Jean-Jacques Nattiez theorizes that noise is not only subjective, its definition, and that of music itself, is culturally specific: “There is never a singular, culturally dominant conception of music; rather, we see a whole spectrum of conceptions, from those of the entire society to those of a single individual” (43). Noise in this context is therefore most often positioned as the result of music that runs contrary to an established set of rules. However subjective the assessments of both the musical producer and listener, Nattiez notes that these “‘criteria’ are always defined in relation to a threshold of acceptability encompassing bearable volume, the existence of fixed pitches, and a notion of order – which are only arbitrarily defined as norms” (45). 
 If these criteria are arbitrary, then music might just as arbitrarily be redefined to valorize noise rather than eschew it, something true of Public Enemy and their musical aesthetic of noise. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988) uses saxophone samples in many songs that act in tandem with the lyrics to form “an aggression against the code-structuring messages” (Attali 27) found in popular music conventions. Moreover, noise has been a part of the musical landscape for longer than we might think. Public Enemy’s examples are comparable to the use of dissonance in the music of jazz legends Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and others. Public Enemy created noise with saxophone squeals, erratic drums, and countless scratches on Nation, a recording that has influenced numerous hip-hop artists and it stands today as a critically lauded and influential album. This paper investigates Public Enemy’s use of saxophone samples as a strategy of creating noise as representative of ideals contrary to conventional Western musical practices, and as a bridge to African-American musical practices and suppressed voices of the past.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.011
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Meta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.533
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.011
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.003
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.110
GPT teacher head0.374
Teacher spread0.264 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2015
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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