A singer’s perspective on Sirens and singing: An interview with coloratura soprano/conductor Barbara Hannigan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Sirens appear in one of the most iconic literary episodes on music-making and music-hearing, in Homer’s twelfth book of The Odyssey (2018: 194), singing an irresistible and lethal song. While the myth of the Sirens’ song has continued to exist for almost three millennia in various formats, this Voicing queries the relevance of the myth as a reference for the practice of singing and examines the experiences of a classical singer who works within contemporary music and has embodied Sirens in performance. Following a short scholarly introduction that questions the role of the singing voice in the Siren song, practitioner-scholar Sophia Edlund interviews Canadian interpreter of contemporary music, soprano/conductor Barbara Hannigan, specifically asking her to consider the meaning of the Sirens and their symbolic value for singing. In this interview, Barbara Hannigan compares her music-making practice with the speculative practice of ‘Siren-ing’, pointing to similarities, such as being in a state of metamorphosis during singing, as well as divergences in terms of how singing is practised and understood.
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 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 | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".