Machine Learning in Context, or Learning from LANDR: Artificial Intelligence and the Platformization of Music Mastering
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article proposes a contextualist approach to machine learning and aesthetics, using LANDR, an online platform that offers automated music mastering and that trumpets its use of supervised machine learning, branded as artificial intelligence (AI). Increasingly, machine learning will become an integral part of the processing of sounds and images, shaping the way our culture sounds, looks, and feels. Yet we cannot know exactly how much of a role or what role machine learning plays in LANDR. To parochialize the machine learning part of what LANDR does, this study spirals in from bigger contexts to smaller ones: LANDR’s place between the new media industry and the mastering industry; the music scene in their home city, Montreal, Quebec; LANDR use by DIY musicians and independent engineers; and, finally, the LANDR interface and the sound it produces in use. While LANDR claims to automate the work of mastering engineers, it appears to expand and morph the definition of mastering itself: it devalues people’s aesthetic labor as it establishes higher standards for recordings online. And unlike many other new media firms, LANDR’s connection to its local music scene has been essential to its development, growth, and authority, even as they have since moved on from that scene, and even as the relationship was never fully reciprocal.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.002 | 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 it