To Beast or Not to Beast: Koala-tative Evidence for a Bestial Hermeneutics of Extreme Metal Vocals

Description

Extreme metal vocal research has expanded to multiple interests: physiological mechanisms (Eckers et al 2009, Guzman et al 2018, Tsai et al 2010), acoustics (Smialek et al 2012, Kato and Ito 2013, Smialek 2015, Hainaut 2020), classifications (Mesiä and Ribaldini 2015, Ribaldini 2019), machine encoding (Nieto 2013, Kalbag & Lerch 2022, Czedik-Eysenberg et al 2024), vocal health (Guzman et al 2014, Cardinal 2020, 55–56, Aaen et al 2022), perceptions among listeners (Kato and Ito 2013, Olsen et al 2018), and the lived experiences of female vocalists (Heesch 2018, Burns 2023). Part of a two-year project on artistry in extreme metal vocals, my presentation synthesizes this research and provides new evidence for why multiple subgenres imitate different bestial sound-sources.

I first apply the source-filter model of acoustic phonetics to extreme metal. Ventricular folds create inharmonic sounds filtered through vocal-tract-area alterations (by tongue placement, jaw closure, and lip rounding). Thus, in death metal, inhuman sounds, passed through an enlarged filter, physiologically imitate a large beast. This aligns with Smialek’s corpus study (2015), which showed consistently low first-formant (F1) values in death metal and high F1 frequencies in black metal. Because screams activate the amygdala (Arnal et al 2015), the high sounds of black metal screams invoke fear-based evil such as the shrieks of the Nazgûl in film sound effects. Deathcore and grindcore combine these effects with low-F1/high-F2 to generate what are widely called “pig squeals.”

Next, I connect acoustical findings on death metal to zoological research on koala bellows. Koalas evolved acoustical impressions of maximal size via a “permanently descended larynx,” “a deeply anchored sternothyroid muscle that [allows] male koalas to retract their larynx into the thorax,” and vocal tracts nearly the length of their body (Charlton et al 2011, 3414). During mating competition, koalas behave differently depending on acoustical cues about their competitors’ size (Jiang et al 2022). Considering that YouTube videos of koala bellows provoke numerous comparisons to metal vocals, their similar acoustic cues about monstrous size in death metal seem central to its aesthetics. This has implications for research on gender discrimination within metal—both with prejudices around visual impressions of power and with vocalists’ strategies to thrive in an often discriminatory genre.

Period	20 Jun 2024
Event title	New Perspectives on the Analysis of the Voice
Event type	Conference
Location	Lyon, FranceShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International