This article originally appeared on NOISEY.
Back in high school, the screaming and growling of metal and post-hardcore vocalists was an easy way for teens to piss off their parents, as perfectly summarized by this possibly satirical but nonetheless beautiful copypasta image.
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Still, it’s a huge, inextricable part of the subculture almost because it acts as a dealbreaker for those who will never know the joy of hearing Nergal of Behemoth do that extremely rad thing where he layers his high-pitched and low-pitched vocals on top of each other. In any case, the mystery of how metal vocalists perform night after night while also not destroying their throats has plagued metalheads for eons. Luckily, science has an answer, and that answer is to become an infant.
“Heavy metal singing is essentially what a baby does,” says Dr. Krzysztof Izdebski of the Pacific Voice and Speech Foundation, instantly and unintentionally ethering generations of metal frontmen. Izdebski elaborates on this, though, explaining that the typical growls of extreme metal don’t actually cause the vocal folds to collide, which means that no damaging nodules will form from the friction. It’s the same technique that small children use to scream and wail for hours on end without causing permanent damage. We can basically infer from this that all humans were black metal singers at some point. Babies = metal AF, apparently. The video that lays all of this out is genuinely fascinating, so give a watch. Raise your children to be headbangers, even though they probably already are, according to science.
Phil can’t believe he’s always been metal. He’s on Twitter.
