Extreme Metal Vocals: Genre as a Candle in the Dark

  • Eric Smialek (Speaker)

Activity: Talk or presentation typesInvited talk

Description

Using David Brackett's notions of genrification and iterative emergence from his book Categorizing Sound (2016) and his introductory essay to the 2023 special issue of Volume! « La fin des genres musicaux ? », I begin with counterarguments to discourses that proclaim the notion of musical genre to be obsolete or dead in some way. I then show through two case studies--efforts at taxonomizing extreme metal vocal styles and empirical studies of fan responses to sound clips of extreme metal vocals--that genre is a fruitful theoretical lens for maxing sense of empirical data and unifying existing theories of musical expression.
Period5 Nov 2025
Held atCentre for Research in Music and its Technologies
Degree of RecognitionLocal