Eric Smialek
Eric Smialek received his PhD in musicology (2016) at McGill University and he is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellow at Huddersfield University. He is an electric guitarist with 29 years of playing experience and he serves as the Assistant Editor to IASPM Journal and an editorial advisory board member for the journal Metal Music Studies.
Dr. Smialek’s research combines close music analysis with verbal analyses from discourses such as interviews and reviews. Central to his work is an interdisciplinary mixture of methodologies from musicology and music theory as well as linguistics, sociology, and philosophy. His dissertation, "Genre and Expression in Extreme Metal Music, ca. 1990–2015," developed methods of music analysis for extreme metal screams by analyzing vowel formants using spectrographic techniques from acoustic phonetics. Other chapters drew on interdisciplinary genre theory to critique taxonomies of genre, demonstrated that adolescents represent a stigmatized social group in metal discourses, and developed a semiotic approach to studying climactic sections in musical form.
Dr. Smialek's recent publications include a chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music and an article on Taylor Swift and LGBTQ allyship in Contemporary Music Review. Smialek’s research is scheduled for publication in Heavy Metal Music and Dis/Ability; Music and Genre; The Routledge Handbook of Metal Music Composition; and The Routledge Handbook of Progressive Rock, Metal, and the Literary Imagination.
Dr. Smialek’s other publications in progress expand beyond his primary research on metal. Topics include identity politics in the queer anthems of Katy Perry, a semiotic analysis of the exoticized reception of Icelandic band Sigur Rós, a semiotic and sociological analysis of how music in professional ice hockey broadcasts helps to construct different team personae, and an article that asks to what extent the "delayed backbeat" in Southern soul music is a myth to promote the music's sense of racial authenticity.
Dr. Smialek has presented at meetings of the American Musicological Society (AMS), the Society for American Music (SAM), national branches of the International Association for Popular Music (IASPM-Canada and IASPM-US), the Popular Culture Association of Canada (PCAC), the Music and the Moving Image conference, the International Computer Music Association conference (ICMC), the Digital Audio Effects (DAFx) conference, the “Présence de la musique” competition of the Société Québécoise de Recherche en Musique (SQRM), and numerous metal-studies conferences in the UK and North America.
Supervisors: David Brackett and Nicole Biamonte
Dr. Smialek’s research combines close music analysis with verbal analyses from discourses such as interviews and reviews. Central to his work is an interdisciplinary mixture of methodologies from musicology and music theory as well as linguistics, sociology, and philosophy. His dissertation, "Genre and Expression in Extreme Metal Music, ca. 1990–2015," developed methods of music analysis for extreme metal screams by analyzing vowel formants using spectrographic techniques from acoustic phonetics. Other chapters drew on interdisciplinary genre theory to critique taxonomies of genre, demonstrated that adolescents represent a stigmatized social group in metal discourses, and developed a semiotic approach to studying climactic sections in musical form.
Dr. Smialek's recent publications include a chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music and an article on Taylor Swift and LGBTQ allyship in Contemporary Music Review. Smialek’s research is scheduled for publication in Heavy Metal Music and Dis/Ability; Music and Genre; The Routledge Handbook of Metal Music Composition; and The Routledge Handbook of Progressive Rock, Metal, and the Literary Imagination.
Dr. Smialek’s other publications in progress expand beyond his primary research on metal. Topics include identity politics in the queer anthems of Katy Perry, a semiotic analysis of the exoticized reception of Icelandic band Sigur Rós, a semiotic and sociological analysis of how music in professional ice hockey broadcasts helps to construct different team personae, and an article that asks to what extent the "delayed backbeat" in Southern soul music is a myth to promote the music's sense of racial authenticity.
Dr. Smialek has presented at meetings of the American Musicological Society (AMS), the Society for American Music (SAM), national branches of the International Association for Popular Music (IASPM-Canada and IASPM-US), the Popular Culture Association of Canada (PCAC), the Music and the Moving Image conference, the International Computer Music Association conference (ICMC), the Digital Audio Effects (DAFx) conference, the “Présence de la musique” competition of the Société Québécoise de Recherche en Musique (SQRM), and numerous metal-studies conferences in the UK and North America.
Supervisors: David Brackett and Nicole Biamonte
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Journal Articles by Eric Smialek
Contributions to Essay Collections by Eric Smialek
Our chapter contributes to debates about metal and class identity by studying metal’s connections to music associated with higher education and upward social mobility. Drawing from research on cultural legitimation (Bourdieu 1993), and rock authenticity (Keightley 2001), we use band interviews and music analysis to reveal metal that prioritizes complexity and that draws from classical conservatories and experimental art. We show how analysis can reveal separate methods of generating musical patterns with comparisons between the music of Pantera, Gustav Mahler, and Meshuggah; we show how Gorguts’ connections to conservatory training and progressive rock helped them to write a thirty-three-minute song; we explain how Stravinsky influenced Septicflesh’s orchestral writing in “Mad Architect” (2011); finally, we outline how Unexpect play with genre mixture, musical surprises, and backwards lyrics in a way that derives from their formal educational backgrounds and appeals to connoisseurs. Like Brown (2016), we argue that metal’s middle-class identity deserves more emphasis and that it can be better understood by exploring its manifestations of aesthetic values traditionally linked with class privilege.
To explain the magnitude and endurance of fans’ frustrations, I pursue a reception study of fan and media discourses surrounding Metallica’s major controversies between 1991 and 2008. Drawing from Glenn Pillsbury’s study of Metallica and sell-out accusations (2006: 133–81) that focuses on racial, class, and gender codes, I synthesize these factors within an account of subcultural prestige using theories from Pierre Bourdieu’s “Field of Cultural Production.” As the accusations mount, Metallica and their angry fans move further apart in Bourdieu’s field, in which economic success is inversely related to artistic prestige. Fan complaints about monetary greed, particularly those directed at commercially successful producers Bob Rock and Rick Rubin, suggest that many fans share Bourdieu’s opposition of prestige and popularity, despite media scholars’ criticisms that it relies on an outdated, simplistic model of cultural production stemming from the nineteenth century (Hesmondhalgh 2006).
Doctoral Dissertation by Eric Smialek
As the first book-length musicological study of extreme metal, this dissertation responds to this critical gap by outlining, in previously unattempted detail, a wide range of genre conventions and semiotic codes that form the basis of aesthetic expression in extreme metal. Using an interdisciplinary mixture of literary genre theory, semiotics, music theory and analysis, acoustics, and linguistics, this dissertation presents a broad overview of extreme metal’s musical, verbal, and visual-symbolic systems of meaning.
Part I: Interconnected Contexts and Paratexts begins with a critical survey of genre taxonomies, showing how their implicit logic masks value judgments and overlooks aspects of genre that are counterintuitive. This leads to an investigation of boundary discourses that reveals how fans define extreme metal negatively according to those subgenres and categories of identity that they treat as abject Others: nu metal, screamo, and deathcore as well as their associations with blackness, femininity, and adolescence. Part I concludes with a thick description of death metal and black metal that shows how its lyrics, album reviews, album artwork, band logos, and font styles collectively provide messages about the semantics of genre, most notably by drawing upon archetypes of the sublime and, in the case of raw black metal, the dystopian imagery of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century woodcut engravings.
Part II: Analyzing Musical Texts synthesizes large corpus studies of musical recordings with close readings of individual songs. This section begins with a demonstration of how technical death metal bands Cannibal Corpse, Demilich, and Spawn of Possession play with listener expectations towards meter, syntax, and musical complexity to create pleasurable forms of disorientation that reward active and repeated listenings. It proceeds to investigate musical accessibility and formal salience in melodic death metal, showing through examples by In Flames and Soilwork how the notion of melody pervades this music and contributes to its sense of rhetoric. Part II concludes with a study of musical expression in extreme metal vocals. Using discussions and recordings from a vocalist participant, a corpus study of eighty-five songs that begin with wordless screams, and close readings of excerpts by Morbid Angel, Zimmers Hole, and At the Gates, I demonstrate that the acoustical features of vowel formants are central to vocal expression in extreme metal, enabling vocalists to mimic large beasts in a way that fans find convincing and powerful.
Master's Thesis by Eric Smialek
Extreme Metal Vocals (see also Chap. 6 of diss.) by Eric Smialek
We begin from the performer's perspective, addressing the physiological mechanisms involved in the production of extreme metal vocals as well as their primary acoustical characteristics. Because, as we argue, the formant frequencies of vowels are amongst the most important—and under-researched—of these, we demonstrate in two separate contexts how vocalists have sacrificed the intelligibility of their lyrics by expressively altering their vowels. Finally, to demonstrate further expressive resources used by extreme metal vocalists, we show how rapid and large fluctuations in a first formant frequency envelope support arguments made by Williams and Stevens (1972) on the acoustical correlates of emotions and speech.
We begin from the performer's perspective, addressing the physiological mechanisms involved in the production of extreme metal vocals as well as their primary acoustical characteristics. Because, as we argue, the formant frequencies of vowels are amongst the most important—and under-researched—of these, we demonstrate in two separate contexts how vocalists have sacrificed the intelligibility of their lyrics by expressively altering their vowels. Finally, to demonstrate further expressive resources used by extreme metal vocalists, we show how rapid and large fluctuations in a first formant frequency envelope support arguments made by Williams and Stevens (1972) on the acoustical correlates of emotions and speech.
Book Reviews by Eric Smialek
CV by Eric Smialek
Our chapter contributes to debates about metal and class identity by studying metal’s connections to music associated with higher education and upward social mobility. Drawing from research on cultural legitimation (Bourdieu 1993), and rock authenticity (Keightley 2001), we use band interviews and music analysis to reveal metal that prioritizes complexity and that draws from classical conservatories and experimental art. We show how analysis can reveal separate methods of generating musical patterns with comparisons between the music of Pantera, Gustav Mahler, and Meshuggah; we show how Gorguts’ connections to conservatory training and progressive rock helped them to write a thirty-three-minute song; we explain how Stravinsky influenced Septicflesh’s orchestral writing in “Mad Architect” (2011); finally, we outline how Unexpect play with genre mixture, musical surprises, and backwards lyrics in a way that derives from their formal educational backgrounds and appeals to connoisseurs. Like Brown (2016), we argue that metal’s middle-class identity deserves more emphasis and that it can be better understood by exploring its manifestations of aesthetic values traditionally linked with class privilege.
To explain the magnitude and endurance of fans’ frustrations, I pursue a reception study of fan and media discourses surrounding Metallica’s major controversies between 1991 and 2008. Drawing from Glenn Pillsbury’s study of Metallica and sell-out accusations (2006: 133–81) that focuses on racial, class, and gender codes, I synthesize these factors within an account of subcultural prestige using theories from Pierre Bourdieu’s “Field of Cultural Production.” As the accusations mount, Metallica and their angry fans move further apart in Bourdieu’s field, in which economic success is inversely related to artistic prestige. Fan complaints about monetary greed, particularly those directed at commercially successful producers Bob Rock and Rick Rubin, suggest that many fans share Bourdieu’s opposition of prestige and popularity, despite media scholars’ criticisms that it relies on an outdated, simplistic model of cultural production stemming from the nineteenth century (Hesmondhalgh 2006).
As the first book-length musicological study of extreme metal, this dissertation responds to this critical gap by outlining, in previously unattempted detail, a wide range of genre conventions and semiotic codes that form the basis of aesthetic expression in extreme metal. Using an interdisciplinary mixture of literary genre theory, semiotics, music theory and analysis, acoustics, and linguistics, this dissertation presents a broad overview of extreme metal’s musical, verbal, and visual-symbolic systems of meaning.
Part I: Interconnected Contexts and Paratexts begins with a critical survey of genre taxonomies, showing how their implicit logic masks value judgments and overlooks aspects of genre that are counterintuitive. This leads to an investigation of boundary discourses that reveals how fans define extreme metal negatively according to those subgenres and categories of identity that they treat as abject Others: nu metal, screamo, and deathcore as well as their associations with blackness, femininity, and adolescence. Part I concludes with a thick description of death metal and black metal that shows how its lyrics, album reviews, album artwork, band logos, and font styles collectively provide messages about the semantics of genre, most notably by drawing upon archetypes of the sublime and, in the case of raw black metal, the dystopian imagery of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century woodcut engravings.
Part II: Analyzing Musical Texts synthesizes large corpus studies of musical recordings with close readings of individual songs. This section begins with a demonstration of how technical death metal bands Cannibal Corpse, Demilich, and Spawn of Possession play with listener expectations towards meter, syntax, and musical complexity to create pleasurable forms of disorientation that reward active and repeated listenings. It proceeds to investigate musical accessibility and formal salience in melodic death metal, showing through examples by In Flames and Soilwork how the notion of melody pervades this music and contributes to its sense of rhetoric. Part II concludes with a study of musical expression in extreme metal vocals. Using discussions and recordings from a vocalist participant, a corpus study of eighty-five songs that begin with wordless screams, and close readings of excerpts by Morbid Angel, Zimmers Hole, and At the Gates, I demonstrate that the acoustical features of vowel formants are central to vocal expression in extreme metal, enabling vocalists to mimic large beasts in a way that fans find convincing and powerful.
We begin from the performer's perspective, addressing the physiological mechanisms involved in the production of extreme metal vocals as well as their primary acoustical characteristics. Because, as we argue, the formant frequencies of vowels are amongst the most important—and under-researched—of these, we demonstrate in two separate contexts how vocalists have sacrificed the intelligibility of their lyrics by expressively altering their vowels. Finally, to demonstrate further expressive resources used by extreme metal vocalists, we show how rapid and large fluctuations in a first formant frequency envelope support arguments made by Williams and Stevens (1972) on the acoustical correlates of emotions and speech.
We begin from the performer's perspective, addressing the physiological mechanisms involved in the production of extreme metal vocals as well as their primary acoustical characteristics. Because, as we argue, the formant frequencies of vowels are amongst the most important—and under-researched—of these, we demonstrate in two separate contexts how vocalists have sacrificed the intelligibility of their lyrics by expressively altering their vowels. Finally, to demonstrate further expressive resources used by extreme metal vocalists, we show how rapid and large fluctuations in a first formant frequency envelope support arguments made by Williams and Stevens (1972) on the acoustical correlates of emotions and speech.