Surface Listening: Free Association and Recitation in the Wooster Group's The B-Side: "Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons" A Record Album Interpretation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay is a critical narrative of an experience of listening to the Wooster Group’s The B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons” A Record Album Interpretation (2017). The performance is a verbatim recitation of a 1965 ethnographic recording by Bruce Jackson of African American men toasting and singing works songs just before Texas prisons were desegregated. African American actors on stage hear the album through earpieces and re-perform songs and toasts in real time as the LP plays on a turntable visible (but mostly inaudible) to the audience. Their interpretation “transmits” the album to an audience. The essay, continuing that work of transduction, draws from the psychoanalytic notion of “free association” in order to think through the possibilities and limitations of listening across race and gender. It argues that association is a reciprocal way of listening and making theatre. It is also a way of working through history (recorded and unrecorded) in the face of intractable frameworks of racial antagonism in the United States. The essay assembles and “associates” photographs, songs, and excerpts of interviews with the show’s makers, as well as pairing concepts from the literature of listening and the archive of Black sonic performance.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".