Experiencing Heavy Timbres Through Metaphors

Abstract Metal listeners describe their music with words that invoke enormous destructive force; this chapter defines heaviness as listeners’ experience of this embodied impact or power. Sound exerts very little actual physical force, so much of that power is imagined in listeners’ minds, mediated by a network of cognitive metaphors for physical qualities like weight, lowness, hardness, roughness, and so on. This chapter analyzes the famous “buzzsaw tone” pioneered by Swedish death metal bands in the 1990s to show how metaphors for destructive power and corporeal impact are used to imagine metal timbres as powerful beyond the mundane realities of amplified guitar sound. A cross product of cognitive metaphors and social listening “stances” reveals that heaviness is not a single quality or concept, but instead, a prismatic spectrum of different embodied experiences and meanings that are available to listeners within the metal genre.