The Hums: Feminist Listening and Gendered Affects in Music Production and Audio Engineering in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation articulates the entanglements of subtle and explicit pressures many women, trans, and gender non-conforming recordists face as they build professional careers in the recording arts in Canada. I present these affective pressure points of power as “hums”: a concept that elucidates the explicit and implicit accumulation of these feelings of un-belonging, which include experiences of isolation, marginalization, microagressions, violence, warnings, and whispers, and illuminates the way hums gradually aggregate in the body over time. I argue that hums and their abrasive “intimacy of body and world” (Ahmed 2017, 190) often go unnoticed by recordists and those involved in the broader music industries because they accumulate and operate on such a personal, subtle, and yet widespread level. I suggest that while it may be relatively rare for early-career women, trans, and gender non-conforming recordists to be outwardly discouraged from fully participating in the professional fields of music production and audio engineering, there are numerous ways to quietly dissuade systemically marginalized recordists from continuing on their chosen professional path. I attend to the particularities of these experiences of conditionality and exclusion based on extensive (auto)ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with recordists at various stages of their careers, examining three categories of hums cited as primary restrictions among my collaborators: a study of hums of neoliberalism, of violence, and of being included. Though presented as discrete, hums are always extended, overlapping and intersecting in their affects. However, this fluidity also allows for the potential for challenges and change. Therefore, as much as this work serves to illustrate the continuity and magnitude of ongoing issues, it also offers moments of transformation, of laughter, of hope, for the future of music production and audio engineering.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.052 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".