Anatomy of Sound: Norman Corwin and Media Authorship
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Years ago the media scholar Robert W. McChesney argued that because a period of expanding corporate consolidation was reshaping media sources historians regularly use, history departments should teach “history of the media” as part of regular course offerings. In the current political moment, with accusations that “the media is the enemy of the people,” and charges of fake news spreading like wildfire, the need for historians to analyze changing practices and presentational strategies of the media is even more urgent, and well addressed by the essays in Jacob Smith and Neil Verma's edited collection Anatomy of Sound. The essays explore form and content in the innovative and transmedia work attributed to Norman Corwin, arguably the most celebrated radio writer of the twentieth century. In the 1940s, when Corwin was radio's undisputed giant, “eight out of ten American families listened for hours each day” (p. 1). Verma investigates Corwin as a sound auteur, analyzing his techniques of sound positioning, especially his use of kaleidosonic style, moving listeners through space and time, and intimate style, encouraging listeners to empathize with characters. Hailed as “radio's poet laureate,” Corwin broadcast early creative experiments with words and music, explored in the essay by Troy Cummings. He was the writer of choice to craft the special broadcasts conveying urgent wartime concerns to millions of listeners. Ross Brown's essay analyzes spatial and sonic theatricality in the V-E Day production On a Note of Triumph (1945), and Tim Crook assesses the transatlantic mode of Corwin's broadcasting in wartime England. Thomas Doherty's essay details the impact of the blacklist in pushing Corwin, a committed opponent of European fascism and anti–New Deal conservatives, out of network radio by 1948. Other essays consider Corwin's corpus of work after the blacklist period by exploring the reverberations of his distinctive aesthetic as he continued to write, produce, and battle for authorial control on noncommercial radio (in the essay by Smith); television (in Shawn Vancour's piece), and film scripts (in Mary Ann Watson's essay) in the United States and Canada through the 1970s.
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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 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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".