What Makes Heavy Metal ‘Heavy’?
What Makes Heavy Metal ‘Heavy’?
Abstract. In this article, I raise a simple but surprisingly vexing question: What makes heavy metal heavy? We commonly describe music as “heavy,” whether as cr
At least one Boss MT-2 on the pedal board.
A man of culture, I see.
You crank it to 11.
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Is there a TL;DR for people who don't have the attention span for academic writing?
And is it possible to buy Babymetal songs with just the music, no vocals?
I'll give it a crack.
As others have hinted at, it's mostly about noise. The author puts noise in quotes when referring to those qualities of sound (and lyrics?) that are normally considered noise but are exploited for aesthetic purposes.
Thus, extreme volume and heavy distortion might normally be undesirable noise when trying to faithfully reproduce a sound, they are exploited by rock music in general and, in their extreme forms, by heavy metal in particular.
A metaphorical or all-inclusive understanding of noise can be applied to the various other aspects of music (rhythm, repetition, tempo, key changes, and even lyrics). The more of these aspects are affected (the more "noisy"), the "heavier" the result.
This was not addressed in the paper, but I think that the noise has to be introduced during the creation or performance of the music. If you play back a recording in ways that distort the signal or sound, you are probably getting noise, not "noise".
And here I thought it had to do with the large number of nucleons...
Huh, just watched a 12Tone video today with the exact same title. Good watch and great channel if you're interested in pop music theory
Overdrive filters and leaving the EQ knobs alone so everything gets muddy.
That's pretty much it.
Full disclosure, I did not read the article.Distortion, low frequencies, and negative lyrics. Without these three things it is just metal.
Heavy comes from the rhythm. Driving drums, chunky riffs, and just like with funk, heavy can be found in the spaces between sounds.