Multiple and Sustained Climaxes in Icelandic Post-Rock: For an Expansion of the Notion of Musical Climax
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Effects produced by music and sex are similar insofar as they make us feel the present moment intensely (Frith 1996): this is probably the reason why our discourses frequently borrow vocabulary from the sexual lexical field when we want to name instants where our musical perception is most stimulated. The word “climax” is a transparent example, since it can literally refer to an orgasm, but is also used to talk about the intensity peak of a piece of music. This metaphor comes with unfortunate restrictions, in this case, the viewing of a climax as the equivalent of one standardized representation of male pleasure – the single orgasm. Yet, to see a musical climax as an intensity peak preceded by a crescendo and followed by an immediate fallout has its limits. It is generally relevant in tonal, classical music, but this outline loses its accuracy when it comes to other genre families, like rock music, which progresses step by step, and does not necessarily include one precise identifiable peak.This article focuses on a post-rock corpus and shows the importance of a more flexible use of the notion of climax in musicology. The studied climaxes, shaped as long sections instead of one-time peaks, illustrate how musical analysis can benefit from alternative templates, namely those of multiple and sustained orgasms. Using these two models as formal references, and relying on Brad Osborn’s work (2013), which evidenced the role of terminal climactic sections in recent rock music, this paper stresses the internal crescendos of the climactic sections often – but not exclusively – heard in post-rock. Their form, instrumentation, harmonic strategies, use of technology and performance highlight the main characteristics of these expanded climaxes: an extended temporality, replicability and reduced teleology.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it