Earwitnessing the Queer Acoustics of Public Space: Law, Sex and Nature in Ultra-red’s Second Nature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines queer sex and public space usage in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park through a series of recordings produced by the sound collective Ultra-red. Ultra-red have been using sound as a mode of political analysis since 1994 when they were founded by two AIDS activists in Los Angeles. This paper works in particular with two records released by Ultra-red in the late 1990s: an EP Ode to Johnny Rio (1998) and album Second Nature: An Electroacoustic Pastoral (1999), which are often referred to collectively as the Second Nature. For the Second Nature project, they draw their sound material from the public and private soundscapes of everyday queer life and cruising in Griffith Park. Ultra-red’s compositions rely on looping, fragmentation, and a radical approach to cutting audio. This disrupts both the musicality and linearity we might expect from recordings that present themselves almost as documentaries that pits queer behaviors, bodies, and identities against the suburban conceits of those who call for laws that curb the behavior in the park through policing, entrapment, barring traffic, and issuing tickets to gay men for loitering and sexual behavior.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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 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".