Sonic Constructions of Transhumanism: A Radiohead Case Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores connections between voice and body through the lens of transhumanism.The voice exists as a sound constructed by the body and a medium for constituting body.This reciprocal relationship gives rise to an ongoing process of transformation.Together with literature on materiality of sound and listening, vocality, and phenomenology, I develop a conceptual framework rooted in transhumanism to: (1) examine how musical and sonic practices mediate understandings of the human body, and;(2) consider dialectical tensions between biological and technological bodies.I apply this to a case study on Radiohead, tracing their aesthetic shift across three albums: The Bends (1995), OK Computer (1997), and Kid A (2000).In understanding voice as the foregrounded sonic layer through which Radiohead navigate their humanness, I discuss how vocalic changes, both in techniques and interactions with other sonic elements, allow Radiohead to negotiate identity and agency, and to undergo transhumanistic reconstruction.I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, William Echard, whose guidance, insights, and seemingly boundless knowledge proved invaluable to this research and served (will continue serving) as a font of inspiration.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".