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

“最后!一本把重金属当作音乐的书。”希拉·惠特利（Sheila Whiteley）为安德鲁·柯普（Andrew Cope）的《黑色安息日的历史》（Cope 2010）所作的序言中，这句开场白感叹了流行音乐研究中长期以来忽视音乐细节的做法。尽管如此，音乐细节对于理解流行音乐和社会是必要的。它们影响着音乐类型系统内的意义循环、音乐产业的基础结构以及乐迷的审美价值。正如Whiteley的声明所表明的那样，金属音乐的学术研究主要集中在由这种音乐的越轨精神、歌词和亚文化引起的社会学问题上。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。但为了让乐迷觉得强大而有说服力，极端金属必须在音乐上传达叛逆。如何做到这一点，在很大程度上，还没有被探索。该项目用四篇文章弥补了这一差距，这些文章综合了声乐技术的语言学、声学、历史和音乐学研究。第一项研究将是对极端金属声的口头描述的接受性研究，这些描述来自杂志和在线评论。从这张语义关系图中，第二篇文章将使用谱图来展示与不同时期和流派相关的极端金属人声的描述符和音乐方面之间的模式。第三篇文章运用这些声学发现来研究高潮部分歌曲的修辞品质。最后，第四篇文章的动态方法使用声乐家的动作捕捉镜头来观察他们的动作是如何传达紧张、期待和高潮的，而不需要参与者口头表达这些信息或有意识地反思他们的动作。最终，该项目将为极端金属的吸引力提供独特的见解，并有助于讨论音乐的意义及其与身份的关系。

"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.