<i>A Day in Algonquin Park</i>: William W. H. Gunn and the circadian audio portrait
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers the place of William W. H. ‘Bill’ Gunn in the history of electroacoustic music with a focus on one of his earliest creative forays, the 1955 production ofA Day in Algonquin Park, a composition in the genre of what the authors have dubbed thecircadian audio portrait. In exploring Gunn’s compositional decisions and the political and creative contexts which surrounded them, we detail his sonic practice and make the argument that Gunn was a soundscape composer before the term was coined, a forerunner of the genre indebted to composers connected with the World Soundscape Project. In doing so, we must acknowledge the ways in which the album’s creation and reception play out paradoxical aspects of the wilderness myth, while feeding into the construction of a popular and idealised Canadian identity. We also find his modernist ecological sensibility struggling to articulate a place for human visitorswithinnature: in this, Gunn’s outlook and concerns were not very different from some contemporary soundscape composers. However, this study goes beyond acknowledging a previously ‘unknown father’ of familiar sounds and debates; in contextualising his work with environmental sound as a contribution to the genre of thecircadian audio portrait, we highlight an alternative genealogy for contemporary soundscape composition.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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.
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".