The Emergence of Efficient Musical Texts during the Age of Reason
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Modern Western musical notation is “efficient” in the sense that every element of a text corresponds to an essential element of the composition represented and to an essential element of every valid performance of that composition. Western notation became efficient only during the eighteenth century. Previously, much Western music — especially music for solo instrument and small ensemble — operated on pretextual, oral principles: it was performed in small communities dominated by celebrated performer/composers who re-created compositions with each performance; their students were taught to perform in this quasi-improvisational way. In such circumstances, a composition could be represented by many different texts. Notation became efficient when increasing numbers of recreational amateurs required music that did not have to be re-created with each performance and that could be learned by realizing texts literally. Printers and composers accommodated them. As texts became efficient, compositions became stable entities defined by texts established by their composers.
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 | 0.014 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.024 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
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".