Digital Media as a Tool of Rhetorical Amplification in Historical Performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The use of digital media to display text and images has become a frequent feature of classical music concerts in recent years, including the field of Historical Performance. What is rarely considered is the potential of the image to amplify rhetorical invention present in text and music. This research project addressed the communicative barriers to meaningful rhetorical exchange that contemporary audiences are expected to overcome—foreign language, unfamiliar poetic meter, and unknown cultural allusions—and sought to create a methodology for using digital media as visual rhetoric, enhancing the rhetorical devices present in text and music.The historical performance practice of self-accompanied Italian and English monody on the theorbo formed the basis of this enquiry, as historical sources identify this genre as best exemplifying the ancient oratorical traditions upon which the study of rhetoric was founded. The priorities of the early seventeenth-century seconda pratica, or second practice, are more readily understood by considering the origins of classical rhetoric, its use in the highly expressive poetry of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and the eventual intersection of music and rhetoric in the sixteenth century. And when the combination of poetic and musical rhetoric becomes the basis upon which visual media applications are introduced in historical performance, projected images and text serve the original performance goal of moving the emotions of the listener. Experiments with the materiality of textual display include handmade paper, linocut printmaking, drypoint etching, gel plate monoprint, cyanotype and anthotype photo processing. By prioritizing rhetorical accountability by first identifying linguistic gesture mirrored in musical rhetoric and then creating visual displays of text to extend these communicative devices, a simple template was formulated that links visual display with rhetorical practice. Further applications of this research extend beyond seventeenth-century monody to any other performance genres that were conceived as vehicles for artful eloquence, where the introduction of visual display may amplify rhetorical invention for a contemporary audience.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".