Bang your Head: Construing Beat through Familiar Drum Patterns in Metal Music

Abstract

This article presents a theoretical framework for understanding headbanging to metal music as an embodied practice of perception and offers several analyses to demonstrate how specific patterns serve as a common core of rhythmic patterning in the genre. Listeners express metal’s flexible rhythmic style through headbanging, creating experiences of heaviness and community. This motion brings felt beats into existence, guided by what I call “metering constructions,” familiar rhythmic/motional patterns that are both schematic knowledge of music and embodied practices of perception. I define metering constructions through theories of embodied meter and cognitive linguistics. Two constructions, the backbeat and the phrase-ending 332, are used throughout rock, but distinguished in metal by characteristic drum patterns and motional qualities. Headbangers thus create and perform their own beat interpretation, what I call a “patchwork quilt of recognized rhythms” stitched together in various orders and combinations—sometimes resembling regular isochronous meter, sometimes not.

Syncopation as Probabilistic Expectation: Conceptual, Computational, and Experimental Evidence

“…1 for several examples). It is commonly employed across a wide range of musical genres, including Western art music (Babitz, 1952; Dodson, 2009; Neumann, 1969), jazz (Ashley, 2002; Benadon, 2009; Strunk, 2016; Waters, 1996), rock or metal (Biamonte, 2014; Hudson, 2022; Tan, Lustig, & Temperley, 2019; Temperley, 1999), and hip‐hop (Adams, 2009; Duinker, 2019; Ohriner, 2019; Walser, 1995; Williams, 2009). However, it is most typically discussed within the context of Western common‐practice music theory, where it is employed to “contradict, but not overturn” the prevailing meter (Leong, 2011).…”

Analyzing the Beat in Metrically Consonant Popular Songs

“…(8) Whether listening to, performing, or simply thinking about these songs, some people may track with the faster drum pa ern layer in response to the drum's role in metric formation, while others may entrain to the absolute time layer because of its more comfortable pacing. (9) Further, a point of the PPL is its flexibility in at least two directions. First, individuals don't have to uniformly select the DPL or the ATL for their PPL in all musical contexts.…”

“…Second, aware of the competing metric cues, people may also enjoy alternating between different PPL options for a song. The result of these a entional shifts is typically more than just conceptual but also physical, where dancing and other movements can double or half in speed based upon how an individual chooses to metrically engage a song (Hudson 2022;Kozak 2021).…”