Abstract: Este estudio estuvo orientado a identificar las bondades que tienen el método hegeliano en los diferentes aspectos de la política y la música con la finalidad de analizar su relación. En tal sentido se planteó los siguientes objetivos: determinar la relación entre la política cultural neoliberal2 y la música heavy metal3, analizar su desarrollo y sus características. Se hizo uso de la encuesta y la entrevista los que se aplicaron a una muestra no probabilística de 30 jóvenes (de 18 a 35 años de edad) metaleros de Huánuco. Se identificó tres generaciones: 1era. Generación de Metaleros 1990-1996 (tesis); 2da. Generación de Metaleros 1997-2003 (antítesis); 3era. Generación de Metaleros 2004-2010 (síntesis). Se evidencia la existencia de una contradicción dialéctica entre la música heavy metal (la cual forma parte de una subcultura) y la cultura dominante en el mundo (en este caso la política cultural neoliberal), ambas evidencian una relación directa no solamente en el aspecto cronológico, sino en el plano ideológico.

Abstract: What kind of rock culture would grow out of an exam-oriented educational system? In the western rock world, self-learning has been characterized as most popular musicians’ principal learning pattern, closely intertwined with the “DIY” ethos and the counter school culture. This research aims to present a different case, that of the “schooled” rock music in Taiwan. Over the last three decades, rock music in Taiwan has grown in popularity, while Taipei has gradually earned the reputation of being the “Mandarin pop/indie capital.” In its developmental process, a few characteristics are worthy of the attention of both the Sociology of Education and youth cultural studies.
Firstly, learning rock instruments in regular high school is the main route for teenagers to gain access to rock culture. Secondly, where elite students tend to devote more time to rock music activities than other students, their musical repertoire is characterized by producing covers of heavy metal tunes instead of song-writing. This thesis will probe the rationale behind this phenomenon by answering the following questions: What can best explain the appeal of heavy rock to Taiwanese elite high school students? Why do they not write their own songs?
Drawing upon data collected through a school ethnography, it is revealed that the ways Taiwanese elite high school students participate in musical activities can be best understood to be part of a subcultural milieu marked by the collective pursuit of “dual excellence in both study and play”. In this symbolic space, the demanding technical requirements for acquiring several playing techniques allow rock to become a rankable sphere of activity in which elite students struggle for subcultural superiority according to measurable musical standards. The emphasis on instrumental virtuosity conforms to students’ competitive disposition manufactured through academic exams. With these features, rock music becomes a particular form of subcultural activity which allows elite students to not only resist educational control, but also exert symbolic violence over peers of lower-ranked high schools by showing technical superiority.
This thesis extends the CCCS’s subcultural solution to the analysis of “subcultural distinction”. In distinction to the “internal perspective” of Sarah Thornton’s conception of subcultural capital (1995), a more holistic framework is developed to explore the relationship between the wider patterns of social division, young people’s subcultural participation, and the shaping of the value hierarchy both within and outside the subcultural sphere. Further, the thesis explores the educational system’s active role in shaping youth subcultures. I demonstrate how education in Taiwan is institutionally mediated by the exam regime to be a powerful logic of social differentiation, and the ways young people’s subcultural choices are constrained by their educational career advance from high school to university. The study also has important implications for the educational policy making in Taiwan. By looking at how students “play,” I propose a new exploratory route to illuminate the widespread impact of the exam-oriented educational system on students’ creativity and identity formation.

Abstract: The first objective of this work was to review the existing literature relating to popular music analysis to determine if standards of harmonic practice within hard rock and heavy metal music have been considered and established. This led to the review of the analytical methods of Guy Capuzzo, Christopher Doll, Walter Everett, Allen Moore, and Ken Stephenson. For the needs of this study, Everett's work (and to a lesser degree, Stephenson's work) is primary as it best summarizes the harmonic schemes used in the pieces analyzed.
Three songs were selected within different subgenres of hard rock and heavy metal: thrash metal (Metallica, “Master of Puppets”), neo-classical metal (Yngwie Malmsteen, “Far Beyond the Sun”), and commercial hard rock (Guns-N-Roses, “Welcome to the Jungle”). These pieces were analyzed extensively to understand the primary harmonic resources that are at work in each. Additionally, the three pieces were compared with regard to their formal elements, melodic materials, texture, and dynamics to draw conclusions about what similarities they share and also how they differ. Depending on the piece and the section under consideration, these three examples exhibited a reliance on modal structures, blues-based materials, and common-practice influences.

Abstract: Automatic genre classification of music has been of interest for researchers over a decade. Many success-ful methods and machine learning algorithms have been developed achieving reasonably good results. This thesis explores automatic sub-genre classification problem of one of the most popular meta-genres, heavy metal. To the best of my knowledge this is the first attempt to study the issue. Besides attempting automatic classification, the thesis investigates sub-genre taxonomy of heavy metal music, highlighting the historical origins and the most prominent musical features of its sub-genres.
For classification, an algorithm proposed in (Barbedo & Lopes, 2007) was modified and implemented in MATLAB. The obtained results were compared to other commonly used classifiers such as AdaBoost and K-nearest neighbours. For each classifier two sets of features were employed selected using two strategies: Correlation based feature selection and Wrapper selection. A dataset consisting of 210 tracks representing seven genres was used for testing the classification algorithms. Implemented algorithm classified 37.1% of test samples correctly, which is significantly better performance than random classification (14.3%). However, it was not the best achieved result among the classifiers tested. The best result with correct classification rate of 45.7% was achieved by AdaBoost algorithm.
(Source: https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/37227#)

Abstract: Program Notes: Intricate Machines was composed for the 2016 Saarbrücken Somermusik festival in Germany. The festival theme was “travel to foreign lands” and this piece, in some sense, represents a larger journey from the chaos of the outside world into a more peaceful sphere of inner reflection. Each of the five movements is connected together and played without pause. Beginning with dense and rhythmic outbursts, the first movement (“Heavy-Metal Viola”) imagines a musical offspring of Bartok and Metallica somehow fused together by string quartet. The second movement (“Bump in the Night”) focuses on juxtaposition: a lone, delicate, solo violin hums quietly, only to face jarring interruptions from the ensemble underneath. Ending with an introspective chorale, the second movement gives way to movement three (“Churning Gears”) in which fast and repetitive ostinatos create a dense interlocking musical machine. The fourth movement (“Constellations”) begins with an eruption of heavy, sustaining, chords that are played freely, out of time. These vibrating orbs of sound gradually recede into distant and ethereal harmonics. Suggesting a celestial atmosphere, the solo cello gently sings a muted melody, leaving us in a place of transformation relative to the earlier movements. Movement five, a playful folk-dance, completes the total journey as an overt contrast to the tense opening movements. Amidst its quirky and bizarre groove, elements of rock, funk, folk-fiddling, and pedal-tone drone music, are assimilated into what composer Steven Mackey describes as “a vernacular music from a culture that doesn’t really exist”—or as I phrase it here, a “Martian Jukebox Hoe-down.”