We look at a study on how death metal singers produce their otherworldly vocals, and therapeutic applications that researchers are investigating.
DANIEL ESTRIN, HOST:
Here's a viral moment from last month's Miss World Chile competition.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
IGNACIA FERNANDEZ: (Singing) [inaudible] .
ESTRIN: Wow. Ignacia Fernandez surprised the audience by ditching traditional musical forms and singing - yes, you're hearing it - death metal. Her singing helped her win the Miss World Chile crown, and researchers analyzing death metal say could also help people with vocal disorders. NPR's D. Parvaz has more.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TO THE HELLFIRE")
LORNA SHORE: (Singing) Hold onto feeling.
D PARVAZ, BYLINE: That's Will Ramos of the band Lorna Shore, growling his way through "To The Hellfire." For his fans, those vocals are a big draw. They're primal, urgent, existential. But to researchers studying how those death metal performers sing like that, those vocals are a marvel with potentially therapeutic applications.
ELIZABETH ZHAROFF: Want to do pig squeal false cords?
WILL RAMOS: (Vocalizing).
PARVAZ: That's classically trained opera singer and voice coach Elizabeth Zharoff instructing Ramos to make one of his many catalog sounds - yep, the pig squeal - while Amanda Stark positions a camera down his throat. Stark is a postdoctoral researcher and a clinical speech language pathologist at the University of Utah. She helps people who are dealing with issues like vocal spasms improve their speech. Zharoff was enrolled in an intensive summer program at the university a few years ago when she met Stark and made her pitch.
ZHAROFF: I've been dying to get a camera down a person's throat as they were making screams or grunts, gurgles, distortions and harmonicities. I really wanted to see what this looked like.
PARVAZ: She already featured Will Ramos on her YouTube channel, The Charismatic Voice, and he didn't know how he made those sounds. So he agreed to participate. What Stark and Zharoff have been seeing in their research with the cameras and MRIs is remarkable. But basically, when we use our voices to produce sounds, they come from two main sources, our vocal folds, or cords, that's inside the larynx at the top of the trachea. We use them to produce vibrations. That's the main part. Then there's a vocal tract, which includes the throat, mouth and nose. But these metal singers do things differently.
AMANDA STARK: The true vocal fold vibration is not the sort of centerpiece of that style of singing, and rather, it's multiple different tissues and muscles that are vibrating above the source or above those true vocal folds.
PARVAZ: Stark said that at times she couldn't even see Ramos' vocal folds on camera. When he was, for instance, making one of his goblin sounds.
RAMOS: (Vocalizing).
PARVAZ: What Zharoff and Stark saw was Will Ramos relying on shaping his vocal tract, as opposed to his vocal folds, twisting his entire larynx and pulling it to one side.
ZHAROFF: If you did that with your hand and you turned your throat tube, you probably wouldn't be able to swallow, much less speak, right? The fact that Will's apparatus twists so extraordinarily, it's just, like, it totally blew my mind.
PARVAZ: And they aren't just looking at male voices.
ALISSA WHITE-GLUZ: (Vocalizing).
PARVAZ: That's Alissa White-Gluz, former vocalist for the Swedish death metal group, Arch Enemy. She's allowing her voice to be recorded, raw and unfiltered, offering a look at how someone with smaller lungs and body size than most male vocalists can create those monster sounds. One of the things White-Gluz does so beautifully, says voice coach Elizabeth Zharoff, is her dynamic shift between clean vocals and distortions. Listen for that switcheroo here in Arch Enemy's "Folie a Deux."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FOLIE A DEUX")
ARCH ENEMY: (Singing) Embalm me with your poison.
(Singing) Yet here I lay, locked in a frozen cage, with just one key.
PARVAZ: That growl there, that's really a challenge, as researcher Amanda Stark pointed out when I asked if she could make a goblin scream.
STARK: No, I can't do the goblin. I'm still working on my Batman false cord. I struggle. So I try to do like the (vocalizing). I just can't do it as effortlessly as these artists can.
PARVAZ: With female death metal singers, Zharoff says the goal is to learn to make those deep, brutal kinds of sounds. And White-Gluz shows it can be done.
WHITE-GLUZ: (Vocalizing).
PARVAZ: What all of this means is that we're not necessarily stuck with the voice we have. These singers are disciplined and train their voices, and despite what it might sound like, Stark and Zharoff saw that these singers were not damaging their throats. These findings could translate into treatment for those who have trouble speaking, perhaps by training them to use different parts of their throats, as these singers do.
STARK: Any of those tissues above the vocal folds. How do we incorporate some of those different vibrations into someone who maybe has had a vocal fold that's paralyzed? Or does this translate into a patient who has had a laryngectomy or had their entire voice box removed?
PARVAZ: Amanda Stark also says there's much more to be learned from how these death metal singers build the airflow, pressure and lung volume needed to make those sounds. But until then...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FOLIE A DEUX")
ARCH ENEMY: (Singing) Yet here I lay, locked in a frozen cage, with just one key.
PARVAZ: ...Stark and Zharoff continue to look down the throats of those primal singers.
(Imitating death metal voice) D. Parvaz. NPR News.
I sound like Cookie Monster (laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FOLIE A DEUX")
ARCH ENEMY: (Singing) You'll always be deep inside. It's where you'll lie. Come spend eternity here with me.
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