Buried in the mix: touring sound technicians, sonic control, and emotional labour on Cirque du Soleil's Corteo
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the lives and labour of the sound technicians who work on Cirque du Soleil’s arena show Corteo, a large-scale, highly structured, corporate touring production. On Corteo, the sound technicians are charged with the faithful recreation of Cirque du Soleil’s proprietary sonic product, including the music, sound effects, and character dialogue, as established by the director, composers, sound designer, and other senior members of the creative hierarchy. The sound technicians manage the constant variations in musical performances and venue acoustics, interventions that should be largely invisible and inaudible. They also manage the feelings of the musicians and each other by engaging in diverse modes of emotional labour. Different groups—sound technicians, musicians, acrobats, and audiences—listen to the show in an ever-shifting, holistic way. The people in these groups understand that the sounds they make during a performance—with instruments and speakers or with laughter and applause—are integral to the show. Sound in the arena becomes an affective web of sources to which each group simultaneously listens and contributes. Sound technicians are sensitive to emotion and affect, and this sensitivity is part of the job. I show that the sound technician’s technical work, emotional labour, and affective sensitivity are vital to the sound design, despite being ‘buried in the mix.’ Corteo’s mode of touring evinces the underlying privilege and power of even low-level employees like sound technicians, as well as Cirque du Soleil’s broader capitalistic priorities and labour practices. Through the case study of Corteo, this dissertation contributes to a growing body of literature that demonstrates that workers at any level in a corporate hierarchy make essential contributions to a final product, even if their labour is obscured by neoliberal logics. Grounded in ethnographic methods and informed by the author’s own experience as a Cirque du Soleil sound technician, this research includes participant observation and interviews with sound technicians, musicians, creative production staff, and audiences.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".