The Sound of Evil

Abstract

Abstract This chapter investigates the “brutal” timbral soundscape of death metal music. Through a discussion of electric guitar tone and vocal techniques, the chapter’s author contends that death metal musicians knowingly manipulate their listeners’ biological responses within a symbolically mediated context, pitting “noise” against “music” in a ritualized dialectic. Theorizing about the role of distortion in the affective vocabulary of the style, particularly with its simulation of bodily pain, the chapter invokes René Girard’s theory of sacrificial violence to conclude that timbre performs potent cultural work in the ritual space of the death metal concert. Sociological and psychological aspects of “extreme” timbres are discussed in conclusion.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.