Inside Science has discovered that metal vocalists are able to summon their unholy growls and screams by using the same vocal process as newborn babies.
Krzysztof Izdebski of Inside Science explains that when babies are born, they can only manipulate their vocal chords to make a few “sounds of scream and growl, and inhalation and high pitch and whistle and low pitch”, as he puts it. So babbling baby garble, basically.
Most adults lose the ability to make these sounds, but metal singers don’t. As the video below shows, Izdebski studied the throat of a metal vocalist using a super slo-mo camera, which records 16,000 frames a second – normal video is 24 frames per second.
As he explains (transcription via AltPress): “A growl is, is one of the most aggressive sounds that heavy metallers do; it sounds something like ‘Rahhhh!!!’ Okay. So, a growl is produced — and they can do it over and over and over, hour after hour … The images that we recorded clearly show that it’s produced predominately, predominately by structures above the glottis. So, the vocal folds do open and vibrate but actually don’t collide, and the entire sick area above — aryepiglottic folds, arachnoids, epiglottis — everything claps and dances, basically, and creates vibrations and creates acoustic orchestration.
“And these guys do, they do produce really very specific tasks and very specific melodies that are then supported by instruments. And it’s not just kind of going on stage and screaming and doing sort of random stuff. They really compose this stuff.”
Now you know. Watch the video below to watch this in action.
