![]() ![]() "That's quite intentional in death metal the social identity is really important," he said.Īccording to the research, it is still "an open question" whether the violent words and messages in death metal music cause aggressive thoughts and behaviour. Non-fans are repelled by the music and the imagery, says Professor Thompson, and that helps draw a sharp boundary between the in-group and out-group. "The aggressive violent lyrics is one way for death metal music to generate a very coherent community, a kind of in-group of people who understand and get it," he explained. He said fans viewed death metal as an artwork, and not as a real-life form of aggression. Professor Thompson and his team have been looking into whether fans are normalising violence by listening to violent lyrics sung in the distinctive death metal style. The growling and screaming sounds of death metal vocalisation are usually associated with aggression and fear. Loading YouTube content Does listening to death metal lead to real-life violence? This, said Professor Thompson, is not much different to normal conversational comprehension, where we fill in the blanks of words we don't hear or understand by using context to guide us. "We also balanced words that were kind of aggressive and likely to occur in a death metal song with lyrics that were kind of neutral, not particularly aggressive or violent words."įans were able to understand about two-thirds of the words they were asked to listen to. "We made sure the death metal fans were not familiar with those particular songs, and we extracted them in a way that they had no idea what those words were," Professor Thompson said. The study subjects, fans and non-fans alike, were asked to listen to isolated words, so they weren't able to piece together meaning from a sentence where the sense was gleaned from the context.Īnd the researchers took other precautions, too. "Being a fan is in a sense like having a version of expertise it's almost like a proxy for a form of musical training." "So, fans have this music-specific expertise at being able to comprehend these highly distorted lyrics. "They're transposed down to a low-pitch register not used in speech, so people have to really listen carefully to be able to understand any of the lyrics." "Death metal music involves lyrics that are extremely hard to understand," he added. It's a death metal thing, you wouldn't understand Arch Enemy was awesome before Alissa White-Gluz took over at vocals. ![]() Its members were in bands such as Carcass, Armageddon, Carnage, Mercyful Fate, Spiritual Beggars, and Eucharist. "Fans can decode kind of in the same way that somebody familiar with a Scottish accent could understand a very strong Scottish accent when the rest of us can't," Professor Thompson said. 7 Arch Enemy Arch Enemy is a Swedish melodic death metal band, originally a supergroup, from Halmstad, formed in 1996. The research found fans got around two-thirds of the words correct and non-fans less than half, based on a multiple choice selection. Professor Bill Thompson, from the Department of Psychology at Macquarie University, has co-authored research published in the Journal of Music Perception which studied how well 64 participants understood words taken from death metal songs. Scroll to the bottom of the page for the answer. To non-fans in the study, these isolated words sound like noise. To the untrained ear, the sounds of death metal music can be a cacophony of heavy guitar, pounding bass and incomprehensible lyrics.
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