Death Metal Music Inspires Feelings of Joy and Not Violence According To New Study

The lyrics to many death metal bands can be gruesome, violent, misogynistic, vile and more. But that doesn't mean that the music inspires violence according to a new study.

Macquarie University's music lab used Bloodbath's cannibalism theme song "Eaten" for its psychological test. The study revealed that death metal fans are not desensitized to violent music or imagery according to the findings published in the Royal Society journal Open Science.

"[Death metal] fans are nice people," said Prof Bill Thompson, from the Australian university, which is based in Sydney. "They're not going to go out and hurt someone."

This latest study is part of a decades-long investigation by Prof Thompson and his colleagues into the emotional effects of music. These effects, he explained, are complex.

"Many people enjoy sad music, and that's a bit of a paradox - why would we want to make ourselves sad?" he asked. "The same can be said of music with aggressive or violent themes. For us, it's a psychological paradox - so [as scientists] we're curious, and at the same time we recognise that violence in the media is a socially significant issue."

The test involved asking 32 fans and 48 non-fans listen to death metal or to pop whilst looking at some pretty unpleasant images.

Lead researcher Yanan Sun explained that the aim of the experiment was to measure how much participants' brains noticed violent scenes, and to compare how their sensitivity was affected by the musical accompaniment.

To test the impact of different types of music, they also used a track they deemed to be the opposite of Eaten.

"We used 'Happy' by Pharrell Williams as a [comparison]," said Dr Sun.

Each participant was played Happy or Eaten through headphones, while they were shown a pair of images - one to each eye. One image showed a violent scene, such as someone being attacked in a street. The other showed something innocuous - a group of people walking down that same street, for example.

"It's called binocular rivalry," explained Dr Sun. The basis of this psychological test is that when most people are presented with a neutral image to one eye and a violent image to the other - they see the violent image more.

"The brain will try to take it in - presumably there's a biological reason for that, because it's a threat," Prof Thompson explained.

"If fans of violent music were desensitised to violence, which is what a lot of parent groups, religious groups and censorship boards are worried about, then they wouldn't show this same bias. "But the fans showed the very same bias towards processing these violent images as those who were not fans of this music."

"We don't have any issue with it," Bloodbath's lead singer Nick Holmes told BBC News. "The lyrics are harmless fun, as the study proved." He added that Bloodbath's lyrical content was "basically an aural version of an 80s horror film".

"The majority of death metal fans are intelligent, thoughtful people who just have a passion for the music," he said. "It's the equivalent of people who are obsessed with horror movies or even battle re-enactments."

Prof Thompson said the findings should be "reassuring to parents or religious groups" concerned about violent music.

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Tags:  death metal, violence, science, Bloodbath 

Jason    March 13, 2019