Vocal Distortions of Epic Proportions: A Case Study of Quantifying Ten Extreme Vocalizations used in Deathcore Music

Objective: Since its inception in the early 1970s, metal music has not received the same degree of attention from those in the musicology and voice science communities as other genres despite its growing popularity. Several major subgenres have materialized from the broader genre of metal, each of which have their own unique lyrical/melodic signature or vocal style. Deathcore is one of those musical subgenres. Straddling the line between death metal and metalcore, deathcore has been classified as a “mainstream sound” and the least harmonically diverse of the metal subgenres and, therefore, may be considered a fair representative of the greater metal genre (Herbst, 2023). The vocal sounds used in metal music have been described as noisy, heavy, non-harmonic, and lacking in fundamental pitch (Herbst and Mynett, 2023). Even so, experts have not reached consensus as to what central characteristics or combinations of characteristics distinguish these vocal sounds.

Methods: Will Ramos, lead vocalist in the deathcore band Lorna Shore, relies heavily on kinematic and auditory-perceptional feedback to produce high levels of vocal distortion in his performances. We collected video recordings from flexible laryngoscopy and simultaneous audio recordings while Will executed ten specific extreme vocalizations that he uses to understand how the laryngeal mechanism adjusted to produce each vocalization. Video recordings were analyzed to identify which structures were being manipulated by Ramos to create the different vocalizations. Acoustic recordings were analyzed to identify the spectral centroid, a measure of spectral shift that is robust to roughness or distortion, as well as frequencies of the first 4 formants.

Conclusion: Within the metal and deathcore genres, there is significant variability among the aesthetics of the sounds that artists create and, we suspect, equal variability among the functional and mechanical way in which those sounds are created. To our knowledge, no attempt has been made to map the laryngeal anatomy and physiology of a deathcore vocalist to the acoustic signal of commonly used vocalization in metal music. This study will begin to scientifically stratify these extreme vocalizations in the hopes that we will be able to more broadly classify the sounds of this increasingly popular genre.