“What I Call a Sound”: Anthony Braxton’s Synaesthetic Ideal and Notations for Improvisers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article I look at some of the visual elements in Anthony Braxton’s music and examine how he uses graphic and symbolic notations in particular to initiate fresh approaches to improvisation. Drawing on a previously unpublished interview in which he describes his perceptions of sound, I consider the possibility that Braxton may be a synaesthete who has “colour hearing”. However, since this question appears irresolvable, I focus instead on his music, which certainly embodies a “synaesthetic ideal”, in which sound, colour and shape (and other factors) all correspond, and I trace the possible origins of, and reasons for, this ideal in Braxton’s mystical beliefs and in the upsurge of a synaesthetic culture in fin de siècle European Romanticism. In the second half of the article, I look at some specific examples of Braxton’s alternative notations and, via reference to his Composition Notes and Tri-axium Writings, I explore how his uses of the visual also reflect the values and methodologies he ascribes to the African American creative music tradition, in which “individual presence” (of the participants), as expressed through improvisation, is a crucial factor in performance practice. Finally, I suggest that this mixing of African American and European Romantic influences exemplifies Braxton’s claim that his music is “trans-idiomatic”; that is, it cannot be categorised within any one musical or ethnic tradition, but rather synthesises elements from all.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".