Seeking Awareness of Our Selves and the Environment Through Vocal Improvisation in The Singing Field
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this dissertation, I explore vocal improvisation as a practice of listening awareness.Stemming from my background as a vocalist, music therapist, and educator, I examine the use of the voice when singing in place as a way to change perceptions of the self and the environment.Building on Stephen Feld's theory of acoustemology, Nina Sun Eidsheim's discussion about voice and music as intermaterial practices, and R. Murray Schafer's theory of theatre of confluence, I consider how singing in place can be a way of knowing by listening to the intermateriality between our bodies and the places in which we sing.I explore these ideas through an improvisational performance practice that I call "environmental vocal exploration (EVE)."Through autoethnographic, ethnographic and research-creation methodologies, this dissertation revolves around a project entitled The Singing Field: A Performance of Environmental Vocal Exploration.This project required a summer-long commitment from five singers who joined me in six EVE performances in various locations.Through interviews, debriefs, and journal writing, the performers considered their experiences and shared their perspectives with me.We used vocal improvisation as our primary way to interact with different environments and with each other.To analyze our experiences, I developed the concepts of "environmental countertransference," "environmental vocalist," and "xeno-song."The Singing Field performances were filmed by Hasi Eldib of Carleton University and audio recorded by sound technician John Rosefield.In addition to providing audio-visual data for analysis, the resulting film, titled The Singing Field: A Performance of Environmental Vocal Exploration, is one of the three main outputs of this research-creation project, one being the performances themselves, another being the film, and the third being this dissertation.100310735_Oddy_N iii Through autoethnography, fieldwork, and analysis of data, I show that singing with listening awareness in place can create a relationship between self and place, leading to a new awareness and attunement to both.100310735_Oddy_N
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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 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".