Bibliographic record
Abstract
As Billie Holiday described her unique brand of vocal expression, she claimed that she wanted the “style” of Louis Armstrong and the “feeling” of Bessie Smith. These aesthetic and expressive goals can be interrogated for their analytic and interpretive potential. What elements of her musical presentation capture the jazz stylings of Armstrong and the Classic-blues subjectivity of Smith? Can affective gestures be teased apart from the structural features of the musical performance? Might these apparently distinct elements be in fact integrally bound, the stylistic elements (conventions, manners) serving feeling, and concomitantly the affective elements (emotion, subjectivity, affect) serving structure? By recognizing these distinctive aspects and qualities of a singer’s vocal expression, do we take a step closer to his or her distinctive musical artistry? This article explores the analytic potential of Billie Holiday’s self-proclaimed performance goals by interpreting vocal gesture in her versions of two songs also recorded by Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith. The songs chosen for consideration are “Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness If I Do” (words and music by Porter Grainger and Everett Robbins), written in 1922 and “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues” (music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Ted Koehler), written in 1932. Billie Holiday’s recordings of these songs are credited as tributes to her idols Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong. The analysis illustrates how Holiday gave tribute to Smith and Armstrong through specific strategies of vocal content and gesture while still forging an innovative style and feeling in her own musical expression.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 0.006 |
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".