Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his Beyond Words, Steven Connor defines "phonophobia" as "revulsion at the imperfect voice" (24). Starting with brief comments on behaviours this revulsion has given rise to and the symbolic imaginary from which it emerges, this paper will move into an examination of singers who have opted to sing in ways that embrace vocal sounds others have framed as imperfect. The singers I will focus on work predominantly in the field of improvised music and can be tied to a tradition that I associate with the term "soundsinging." My concern will be not only these singers' general embrace of such sounds, but also their more explicit efforts to collaborate with and perform solidarity with individuals with vocal disabilities as well as with singers whose untrained voices don't convey the qualities that get constructed as vocal "perfection." My examples will begin with a discussion of the work of Phil Minton and Maggie Nicols, who have both been creating inclusive spaces for vocal exploration for over thirty years. I will discuss their methodologies for choral improvisation and emphasize their work with developmentally different and socially marginalized individuals and groups. I will then address recent choral improvisation projects led by vocalists DB Boyko and Thomas Johannsen. Boyko's Express Your Voice choir is an improvising choir for senior citizens in Vancouver, British Columbia. Johannsen's Genetic Choir is a group of vocal improvisers who have collaborated recently both with senior citizens living in group homes and with Tamara van Scheppingen, an aphasic vocalist with whom they realized Cathalijne Smulders' work Circle. An examination of the relationship between phonophobia and ableism will frame these case studies and I will argue that the ways we use our voice and place value on voices have social justice implications and can help us work against dehumanizing forms of Othering.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.095 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".