Extreme Metal Vocals: Musical Expression, Technique, and Cultural Meaning

“终于！一本关于重金属音乐的书在希拉·怀特利为安德鲁·科普的《黑色安息日》（科普，2010年）所作的序言中，开篇的这句感叹语哀叹了流行音乐研究中长期存在的对音乐细节不够重视的做法。尽管有这种做法，音乐的细节是必要的了解流行音乐和社会。它们影响着流派系统内的意义循环、音乐产业的基础设施以及粉丝的审美价值。正如怀特利的声明所表明的那样，金属音乐的学术研究主要集中在音乐的越轨精神、歌词和亚文化所引发的社会学问题上。事实上，极端金属（即死亡金属和黑金属）经常明确的暴力或撒旦主题似乎引起了这种强调。但要想让歌迷们看起来强大而有说服力，极端金属必须在音乐上传达越轨。如何做到这一点，在很大程度上，没有得到探索。该项目弥补了这一差距与四篇文章，综合语言学，声学，历史和声乐技术的音乐学研究。第一个将是一个接受研究的口头描述极端金属声乐，采取从杂志和网上评论。从这个语义关系图中，第二篇文章将使用声谱图来展示与不同时期和流派相关的极端金属声乐的描述符和音乐方面之间的模式。第三篇文章应用这些声学发现来研究歌曲高潮部分的修辞品质。最后，第四篇文章的动力学方法使用声乐家的动作捕捉镜头来观察他们的动作如何传达紧张，预期和高潮，而不需要参与者口头表达这些信息或有意识地反映他们的行为。最终，该项目将为极端金属的吸引力提供独特的见解，并有助于关于音乐意义及其与身份的关系的辩论。

"At last! A book about heavy metal as music." This opening exclamation in Sheila Whiteley's preface to Andrew Cope's history of Black Sabbath (Cope 2010) laments a long-standing practice in popular music studies of under-emphasizing musical details. Despite this practice, musical details are necessary to understand popular music and society. They impact the circulation of meaning within systems of genre, the infrastructure of the music industry, and the aesthetic values of fans. As Whiteley's statement makes clear, metal scholarship has focused primarily on sociological issues raised by the music's transgressive ethos, lyrics, and subculture. Indeed, the often explicitly violent or Satanic themes of extreme metal (i.e. death metal and black metal) appear to invite this emphasis. But to seem powerful and convincing to fans, extreme metal must communicate transgression musically. How this is done has, for the most part, gone unexplored.The project remedies this gap with four articles that synthesize linguistic, acoustical, historical, and musicological studies of vocal techniques. The first will be a reception study of verbal descriptions of extreme metal vocals, taken from magazines and online reviews. From this chart of semantic relationships, the second article will use spectrograms to demonstrate patterns between the descriptors and musical aspects of extreme metal vocals that correlate to different time periods and genres. The third article applies these acoustical findings to study the rhetorical qualities of climactic song sections. Finally, the fourth article's kinetic approach uses motion-capture footage of vocalists to see how their movements communicate tension, anticipation, and climax without requiring participants to verbally articulate that information or consciously reflect on their actions. Ultimately, the project will offer unique insights into extreme metal's appeal and contribute to debates about musical meaning and its relationship to identity.