“Listening Out” to Experimental Music in Canada: Publics, Subjects, Places
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2016 Michael Snow and Mani Mazinani improvised on vintage analog synthesizers in Yonge-Dundas Square, filling Toronto’s busiest commercial commons with retro-futuristic sonic filigree; almost fifty years earlier, Otto Joachim’s four-channel electronic sound installation Katimavik furnished the Canadian Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal with uncannily similar sounds. In both cases, listeners perambulated amongst a sonic-spatial architecture defined by publicness and auditory plurality. In the intervening decades, non-profit artist-run centres proliferated across the country, offering refuge for local experimentalists to develop their craft in the name of regional and national cultural growth. Such is experimental music’s longstanding position on the margins and centres of listening in Canada: its history as a niche practice is replete with attempts to insert itself into the everyday. I argue that the diffusion of experimental music into increasingly quotidian spheres in Canada offers a way to understand how place is engendered through the intersubjectivity of listening—an act implicated in a range of agentive processes. Different from other listening contexts, in listening to experimental music we become interpellated into a relational nexus where the loci of composition, performance, and perception become distributive and unstable. I thus suggest that listening to experimental music in Canada can be thought of as a “listening out” an “attentive and anticipatory communicative disposition.” The examples serve as case studies for refiguring the engagement between creative music and the commons in Canada—what experimental music can “mean in the world.”
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 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 teacher head, 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".