Timbral Metrics for Analysis of Metal Production Then, Now and What Next?

This chapter presents an overview of timbre in metal production from a psychoacoustic and computational musicology perspective, particularly focusing on the use of acoustic feature extraction. Both performance and recording technology have undoubtedly influenced tone in metal productions, but how can the underlying acoustic feature sets shaped by this technology inform production and analysis? This chapter includes an applied feature set extraction of stems from My Dying Bride, and concludes with a speculative view of how such features could be used in the training of machine learning classifiers.