Understanding Organist Occupational Injury: An Epidemiological Study of Canadian Organists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Musicians constantly face the hazard of playing-related overuse injuries. Organists are at particular risk of Playing Related Musculoskeletal Disorders (PRMDs) as they face many challenges not encountered by other instrumentalists, including extreme patterns of motion required by all four limbs, uncontrollable practice hours, as well as many other factors. Since the 1980s, researchers have recommended approaches to injury prevention, and many schools of instruments have performed instrument-specific surveys to gather data, leading to the development of prevention techniques within their teaching pedagogies. While the amount of pre-existing information for organ playing injury prevention is minimal, there is already some evidence suggesting that musculoskeletal injury risk factors exist for organists. Unfortunately, the pre-existing information is not substantial enough for the development of data-driven prevention recommendations specific to organists, leaving the school of organ pedagogy to continue to root itself in inherited playing techniques uninformed by modern research on musician, and specifically, organist injury prevention. This thesis seeks to contribute to the literature on organist injury and injury prevention with the purpose of furthering organ pedagogy’s understanding of organists PRMDs. Using Occupational Health as a focus of research, I have collected data which can be used to confirm that organists have musculoskeletal health problems as well as to act as building blocks towards future research and pedagogical developments in injury prevention for the profession. The primary tool used for this research was an anonymous epidemiological survey distributed to the membership of the Royal Canadian College of Organists. The content and results of the survey relate to: basic demographics; practice and performance habits; individual belief systems in relation to conceptual barriers to normalizing PRMDs; the contextual use of prevention and/or treatment resources; upper and lower body symptoms of pain and function (self-reported); awareness of, access to, and understanding of injury prevention information; experience with Occupational Health and Safety; and, experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.037 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".