Jazz Theory for Community Singers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I developed a six-week curriculum for teaching jazz theory, including harmony and aural skills, to community singers. Research on readily available teaching materials revealed that many books include piano instruction that fairly quickly progresses to advanced skills, and material devoted to theoretic instruction assumes previous exposure to theory rudiments. Academic research focused on creating theory sessions for singers in the community is sparse, and dissertations and theses that address vocal improvisation and jazz theory education largely focus on students in academia. Theory classes, also difficult to locate in Calgary, AB, focus on material beyond community singers breadth of understanding. \n \nCommunity singers with whom I spoke prefer to learn in one-on-one lessons or in classes offered over only a few weeks; their work and family schedules make it difficult for them to commit the time necessary to learn and absorb the complex subject of jazz theory in self-study sessions. \n \nI designed this six-week course to fulfill the following objectives: \n1. Offer the vocalists basic jazz theory education grounded in aural skills, rather than written theory; \n2. Clarify concepts and terminology common in the jazz idiom; \n3. Provide examples on how they can immediately use this training in their practice and performances; and, \n4. Introduce the concepts of intervals, triads, sevenths, common chord progressions, forms, and chart analysis in a vocalist-friendly manner rather than from an instrumentalists viewpoint. \n \nI taught the course in a series of six casual pop-up sessions, much like a house concert. We alternated venues weekly amongst participants homes and the students sat comfortably around the piano. I encouraged them to ask questions as they occurred, and we ended each session with a discussion about how they might incorporate the ideas into their practice sessions and performances. \n \nIt was challenging to create a course that was brief enough to encourage their participation without an onerous time-commitment, difficult enough to speak to their adult intellects and emotions, and broad-based enough to include the pertinent aspects of jazz in order to provide a solid foundation.
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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.059 | 0.018 |
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".