2024 Theses Doctoral

Tactus Transformations in Metal

Hannan, Calder Matthew

In the vast majority of popular music, the tactus—the periodicity that we move to, also known as the beat or the pulse—does not change within a single song. Not so in metal, a genre in which bands will change the rate of this tactus on a dime, reset its phase, or do away with it altogether. This dissertation collects these moments of disruption under the umbrella term “tactus transformation.”

Tactus transformations are multifaceted: they are theoretically complex, challenging for composers and performers, kinetic for headbangers, and meaningful for fans. As such, I take a methodologically parallactic approach to studying them, drawing in each chapter on a different perspective and a different way of knowing. In Chapter One I use a traditional music theory lens to build a taxonomy of these moments, drawing attention to the ways they challenge standard notation and lead to multiple perceptual possibilities. In Chapter Two I present a survey of the conceptual strategies, digital tools, and embodied techniques that metal musicians employ to compose and perform tactus transformations, tracing a throughline of mimetic motor learning and framing metal as an aural musical tradition. In Chapter Three I outline a novel empirical, quantitative method for analyzing headbanging motion from a video of a metal show to trace how fans navigate stasis and synchronization through tactus transformations. In Chapter Four, I analyze discourse about tactus transformations to show that they contribute to meaning for metalheads via complexity, community, and metaphor.

Across the dissertation, I foreground the voices of metal musicians and fans to an unprecedented degree, drawing largely from the dozens of interviews I conducted as part of this project. Implicit in the chapters, and made explicit in the Conclusion, is the argument that music theory benefits from considering the musical knowledge of these “non-theorists.”