Black Metal: Within the Sounds of Nature

This project explores musical composition within the black metal music subgenre. Nature and animal life form a very important aesthetic of this style, but one of the central aims of this project was to introduce nature and animal life as more than just a narrative concept. Here, musical mimicry was employed as a compositional tool to depict and represent animal life in a literal sense. The principal pitches and rhythmic patterns of certain natural sound samples were established, with the resulting structures forming the basis of musical 'motifs’. These motifs became the foundations of the accompanying composition. To the author’s knowledge, this was the first time that musical mimicry had been directly used within black metal composition, which not only forged an even closer relationship with the nature aesthetic, but also opened the style up to the realms of what can be considered ‘programme music’.