The noise voice in heavy metal
Research cooperation between the University of Cologne, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig and Leipzig University Hospital
Duration: 2012 to 2017
Responsible: Marcus Erbe (Institute of Musicology at the University of Cologne), Sven Grawunder (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig, Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture), Michael Fuchs (Leipzig University Hospital, Section of Phoniatrics and Audiology)
The transdisciplinary project is dedicated to the analysis of largely unexplored voice formation processes, such as those found in heavy metal and hardcore punk singing in particular, from a musicological and phonetic-medical perspective. A series of experiments at the beginning of the project with vocalists from the genres of death metal, sludge metal and grindcore showed that vocal techniques such as growling, screaming or shouting cause organic structures above the vocal folds to vibrate (e.g. the epiglottis, the pouch ligaments and the aryepiglottic folds), which are hardly used in conventional singing and speaking. The significance of these vocal techniques for the singers and how they are learned will also be investigated using qualitative research methods.
A further cultural-scientific interest follows on from the interdisciplinary debate on monstrosity. Numerous instances of singing and speaking can be found - for example in fantastic film, video games, vocal performance art, sound poetry and contemporary art music - in which the vocal character of conventional vocal actions is expanded to include highly noisy types of vocalization. What many of these vocal practices have in common is that transgressive expressive content (madness, magic, the diabolical, the spirit world, etc.) is still stylized, but conveyed in a broader range of sound than was usual in the context of earlier vocal aesthetics. It therefore makes sense to ask about the cultural and medial preconditions of such often monstrous voices and to explore possible interactions between the arts and media (see Marcus Erbe, By Demons Be Driven? Scanning "Monstrous" Voices, in: Hardcore, Punk, and Other Junk: Aggressive Sounds in Contemporary Music, ed. by E. J. Abbey and C. Helb, New York 2014, pp. 51-71).
The research described here has been continued since July 2018 in collaboration with vocal pedagogue Renate Braun and with the support of the Deutsche Stimmklinik Hamburg. A new focus is the gender aspect, including the critical review of existing verdicts on the possibilities and limits of gender-specific voice use.