Social Virtuosity and the Improvising Voice; Phil Minton & Maggie Nicols Interviewed by Chris Tonelli
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Phil Minton and Maggie Nicols are two of the most important figures in field of free improvised vocal music. Their significance derives not only from their longevity—Nicols and Minton have each been consistently active in the U.K. and global improvised music scenes for nearly fifty years—or the innovations they are responsible for—Minton's album A Doughnut in Both Hands represents one of the earliest solo vocal free jazz/improvisation recording projects, Nicols' Feminist Improvising Group represented a progressive intervention into the male-privileging socio-politics of free jazz/improvisation communities in the 1970s and 1980s, and both Nicols and Minton are important figures in the practice of fostering choral improvisation—but also for the ethics governing the ways their practices have developed. This interview and critical introduction explore the shape of the ethico-aesthetics behind both their personal improvisational practices and the inclusive community improvisation projects they have developed, including Minton's Feral Choirs to Nicols' The Gathering.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".