Walking with sound: race and the prosthetic ear
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
Black musical forms have bequeathed unto the world a range of techniques of listening, and of making and exploring space via sound. These techniques are born out of the work of Black artists, thinkers, and recordists, who begin to appropriate “the prosthetic ear” of microphones from the colonial postures and oftentimes racist meanings and practices associated with field recording from the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. This is the primary context that informs my work in field recording and soundwalking, which I view as twinned practices. My ongoing project, Echolocution, deploys field recording and soundwalking with and against each other as a way of engaging race and history through sound. To tell the story of its development requires not just a history of my listening across the African Diaspora, but a corresponding discussion about how distinct thinkers impacted and shaped my listening—most notably African American writer and musician Ralph Ellison, and Canadian composer, writer and environmentalist, R. Murray Schafer. Echolocution focuses on recording spaces and sites in the African Diaspora that are associated with historical trauma and are prime sites for commemoration. It has, however, been expanded to engage wider worlds of history, race, and sound, for example, the Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, Germany. Echolocution argues that there is no more powerful way of experiencing non-occult hauntings, cultural contaminations, and the peculiar characteristics of place than by field recording and soundwalking through areas replete with a surplus of history and unresolved conflicts. It also insists that race is as central to listening as it is to history.
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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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