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Listener Expertise Enhances Intelligibility of Vocalizations in Death Metal Music

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Music Perception: an interdisciplinary journal
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Abstract

Death Metal music with violent themes is characterised by vocalisations with unnaturally low fundamental frequencies and high levels of distortion and roughness. These attributes decrease the signal to noise ratio, rendering linguistic content difficult to understand and leaving the impression of growling, screaming, or other non-linguistic vocalisations associated with aggression and fear. Here, we compared the ability of fans and non-fans of Death Metal to accurately perceive sung words extracted from Death Metal music. We also examined whether music training confers an additional benefit to intelligibility. In a 2×2 between-subjects factorial design (fans/non-fans, musicians/non-musicians), four groups of participants (n=16 per group) were presented with 24 sung words (one per trial), extracted from the popular American Death Metal band Cannibal Corpse. On each trial, participants completed a four-alternative forced-choice word recognition task. Intelligibility (word recognition accuracy) was above chance for all groups and was significantly enhanced for fans (65.88%) relative to non-fans (51.04%). In the fan group, intelligibility between musicians and non-musicians was statistically similar. In the non-fan group, intelligibility was significantly greater for musicians relative to non-musicians. Results are discussed in the context of perceptual learning and the benefits of expertise for decoding linguistic information in sub-optimum acoustic conditions.
LISTENER EXPERTISE ENHANCES INTELLIGIBILITY OF VOCALIZATIONS
IN DEATH METAL MUSIC
KIRK N. OLSEN,WILLIAM FORDE THOMPSON,&
IAIN GIBLIN
Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
D
EATH
M
ETAL MUSIC WITH VIOLENT THEMES IS
characterized by vocalizations with unnaturally low fun-
damental frequencies and high levels of distortion and
roughness. These attributes decrease the signal to noise
ratio, rendering linguistic content difficult to under-
stand and leaving the impression of growling, scream-
ing, or other non-linguistic vocalizations associated
with aggression and fear. Here, we compared the ability
of fans and non-fans of Death Metal to accurately
perceive sung words extracted from Death Metal music.
We also examined whether music training confers an
additional benefit to intelligibility. In a 2 2 between-
subjects factorial design (fans/non-fans, musicians/
nonmusicians), four groups of participants (n¼16 per
group) were presented with 24 sung words (one per
trial), extracted from the popular American Death
Metal band Cannibal Corpse. On each trial, participants
completed a four-alternative forced-choice word recog-
nition task. Intelligibility (word recognition accuracy)
was above chance for all groups and was significantly
enhanced for fans (65.88%)relativetonon-fans
(51.04%). In the fan group, intelligibility between musi-
cians and nonmusicians was statistically similar. In the
non-fan group, intelligibility was significantly greater
for musicians relative to nonmusicians. Results are dis-
cussed in the context of perceptual learning and the
benefits of expertise for decoding linguistic information
in sub-optimum acoustic conditions.
Received: June 11, 2017, accepted March 3, 2018.
Key words: auditory perception, emotion, expertise,
lyrics, perceptual learning
I
T HAS BEEN PROPOSED THAT EXPERT MUSICIANS
exhibit enhanced auditory skills that are under-
pinned by specific changes in the brain (Kraus &
Chandrasekaran, 2010; Musacchia, Sams, Skoe, &
Kraus, 2007). These enhancements include a heightened
ability to comprehend speech in the presence of noise
(for a review, see Coffey, Mogilever, & Zatorre, 2017).
One explanation for this enhancement is that expert
musicians are highly sensitive to fine-grained acoustic
information that is important not only for music per-
ception, but also for speech perception, thereby permit-
ting enhanced speech intelligibility under noisy
conditions. However, it is not clear whether this benefit
of expertise extends to the perception of sung lyrics in
the presence of music, a complex auditory environment
in which a singer’s vocal line is embedded within mul-
tiple instrumental textures.
For nonmusicians, evidence suggests that recognition
of sung words is enhanced when that music is familiar
(Russo & Pichora-Fuller, 2008). However, the nature of
this benefit is not well understood. One possibility is
that the benefit is specific to particular songs and does
not extend to unfamiliar songs from a familiar genre of
music. A second possibility is that familiarity with
a genre of music permits enhanced intelligibility of the
lyrical content for all exemplars of that genre. In that
case, recognition of sung words should be better for fans
than for non-fans of a particular genre of music, even if
the specific songs in question are unfamiliar. The pres-
ent study focused on a genre of music with an extremely
‘‘noisy’’ combination of vocal signal and background
instrumentation: Heavy Metal music and its sub-genre
of Death Metal. We predicted that intelligibility of lyr-
ical content in Death Metal should be better for fans
than for non-fans of the genre, even when the specific
musical pieces are unfamiliar to all listeners.
An important motivation for conducting this research
is the violent nature of the lyrical content in a significant
proportion of Death Metal music, which is considered to
be an example of violent media. Death Metal music is
characterized by instrumental and vocal timbres with
unnaturally low fundamental frequencies and high levels
of distortion, roughness, and intensity that are experi-
enced by listeners as loud, aggressive, and highly arous-
ing (Arnal, Flinker, Kleinschmidt, Giraud, & Poeppel,
2015; Berger & Fales, 2005; Tsai et al., 2010; Walser,
2014). Animalistic sounds normally associated with
aggression and fear, such as growls and screams, are also
commonplace in Death Metal vocalizations (Arnal et al.,
2015; Tsai et al., 2010). Both vocal and instrumental
Music Perception,VOLUME 35, ISSUE 5, PP. 527–539, ISSN 0730-7829, ELECTRONIC ISSN 1533-8312. ©2018 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ALL
RIGHTS RESERVED.PLEASE DIRECT ALL REQUESTS FOR PERMISSION TO PHOTOCOPY OR REPRODUCE ARTICLE CONTENT THROUGH THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESSS
REPRINTS AND PERMISSIONS WEB PAGE,HTTP://WWW.UCPRESS.EDU/JOURNALS.PHP?P¼REPRINTS. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/MP.2018.35.5.527
Intelligibility of Death Metal Music 527
... Depending on the subgenre, metal vocals are often characterized by a noisy, rough, and inharmonic timbre due to the use of extreme vocal styles like growling/grunting and screaming (Mesiä and Ribaldini, 2015). This is reflected in a decreased harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR) in the audio signal (Kato and Ito, 2013;Nieto, 2013) and reduces the intelligibility of the lyrics, especially for non-expert listeners (Olsen et al., 2018). ...
... However, especially for genres with particularly dark and violent lyrics (e.g. death metal, black metal), the intelligibility of the lyrics is reduced due to elements that contribute to the perceived hardness, such as noisy vocals due to extreme vocal effects (screams, growls) (Olsen et al., 2018). ...
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