In nature, these sounds indicate an aggressive intention (imagine the sound of a dog growling at you). Fans may have developed an ‘ear’ for picking out the growling vocals, whereas musicians may have enhanced listening skills from years of formal music training.Īs lead author Dr Olsen says, “Not only does this research give us insight into how fans and musicians perceive Death Metal music, it shows that specific kinds of listening expertise can enhance the ability of perceiving noisy and often unintelligible speech something that we commonly experience in our day-to-day lives.”ĭeath Metal lyrics tend to be low-frequency growl-like sounds. The researchers suggest that fans and musicians have an advantage over others because of their perceptual expertise with listening to music (Death Metal or otherwise).
Musicians were similarly able to decipher the lyrics far better than non-musicians, even if they weren’t fans of Death Metal. They found that fans were able to understand the words in these songs far more easily than nonfans. The researchers extracted individual words that were sung (growled) in a song by the popular American Death Metal band, Cannibal Corpse, and asked fans and non-fans of Death Metal who were either expert musicians or non-musicians to try and identify the words. New research published in the June issue of the Journal of Music Perception by Drs Kirk Olsen, Bill Thompson and Iain Giblin shows that Death Metal lyrics are intelligible to certain groups of listeners.
No one can possibly understand the lyrics, surely? At least, that’s what people used to assume. Death Metal music can be a cacophony of heavy guitar riffs, pounding bass lines, machine-gun drumming and incomprehensible growling vocals that deal with topics such as murder, rape, torture, infanticide, and necrophilia.
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