Corporeal Sounding: Listening to Bomba Dance, Listening to puertorriqueñxs
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
Afro-Puerto Rican bomba, the island’s oldest extant genre of drum, dance, and song, is a fundamentally sonic practice. Unique in the tight relation between the execution of movements and the simultaneous sounding of the lead drum, bomba dance enacts a challenge to the Western focus on the visual spectacle of dancing and draws attention to what Ashon Crawley calls the “choreosonic,” or the inextricable linking of movement and sound. Bomba dance attends to creating rhythmic variation through specific movement choices strategically placed within and simultaneously producing the sonic framework of drumming and dancing. As such, it requires a listening that ultimately structures a relationality that interrupts the colonial, white supremacist and heteropatriarchal logic that contains Puerto Rican bodies. Through a close reading of different bomba dancings, this article examines how the dancer’s sounded movements claim, not space itself, but a relation to space and place, pulling bodies into the social and unravelling temporal boundedness. It argues that bomba’s growing popularity on the island and in the diaspora is a measure of its capacity for “listening to flesh,” “listening to flesh speak,” underscoring how this particularly addresses and is attuned to a subaltern, racialized, and femme-identified flesh. As such, bomba is an important case study examining the intersections between sound studies and performance studies, blurring clear distinctions between listening to and doing sound.
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 | 0.001 | 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) | 0.004 | 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 it