... What is more apparent, as the movie goes on, is that these characters (Sonny, Sam, and Billy)... more ... What is more apparent, as the movie goes on, is that these characters (Sonny, Sam, and Billy), the place (the pool hall), the truck, the town of Anarene, and this type of country music all stand, in some sense, for the "authentic." About twenty minutes into the movie, we hear a very ...
... Having first published on Guillaume Dufay and Leonel Power, and serving as president of AMS i... more ... Having first published on Guillaume Dufay and Leonel Power, and serving as president of AMS in the 1970s, Charles and his Music in the New World (1983) provided ample evidence of a move into the still scandalously under-explored areas of American music, popular music ...
In place of the pitched singing found in most genres of Western popular music, extreme metal voca... more In place of the pitched singing found in most genres of Western popular music, extreme metal vocalists use specialized screaming techniques that emphasize timbres associated with aggression, anger, power, alarm, and other emotionally charged utterances. Largely because these techniques resist established methods of music analysis, scholarly writings on heavy metal music have not yet acknowledged several of the most important acoustical and expressive features of the extreme metal voice. Using spectrograms generated with AudioSculpt, a powerful sound analysis, processing, and re-synthesis program, this paper argues that the acoustical properties of vowel formants serve a primary expressive role in enhancing the uncanny timbral qualities of extreme metal vocals.
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.
... What is more apparent, as the movie goes on, is that these characters (Sonny, Sam, and Billy)... more ... What is more apparent, as the movie goes on, is that these characters (Sonny, Sam, and Billy), the place (the pool hall), the truck, the town of Anarene, and this type of country music all stand, in some sense, for the "authentic." About twenty minutes into the movie, we hear a very ...
... Having first published on Guillaume Dufay and Leonel Power, and serving as president of AMS i... more ... Having first published on Guillaume Dufay and Leonel Power, and serving as president of AMS in the 1970s, Charles and his Music in the New World (1983) provided ample evidence of a move into the still scandalously under-explored areas of American music, popular music ...
In place of the pitched singing found in most genres of Western popular music, extreme metal voca... more In place of the pitched singing found in most genres of Western popular music, extreme metal vocalists use specialized screaming techniques that emphasize timbres associated with aggression, anger, power, alarm, and other emotionally charged utterances. Largely because these techniques resist established methods of music analysis, scholarly writings on heavy metal music have not yet acknowledged several of the most important acoustical and expressive features of the extreme metal voice. Using spectrograms generated with AudioSculpt, a powerful sound analysis, processing, and re-synthesis program, this paper argues that the acoustical properties of vowel formants serve a primary expressive role in enhancing the uncanny timbral qualities of extreme metal vocals.
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.
Uploads
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.