Videos by Stephen S Hudson
Following Susan Fast’s work on Led Zeppelin, I argued that riffs are not just sequences of notes,... more Following Susan Fast’s work on Led Zeppelin, I argued that riffs are not just sequences of notes, but motions experienced by performers and listeners. My concept of “motional conceptual models” represents a riff’s motion as a prototype category. When a riff is altered, we experience it as an altered (stretched, fragmented, etc.) version of the original motion. This provides a unified theory for concepts from several previous studies of progressive metal.
Many prog metal bands distance themselves from the uncommon time signatures often used to notate this music, insisting that these theoretical terms are after-the-fact analyses that do not represent how they composed or experienced the music themselves. By thinking of a riff as an embodied shape, and thinking of some of prog metal’s rhythmic complexities as manipulations of felt shape rather than numerical counting, I explained how it is possible to write rhythmically “progressive” rock and metal rhythms by feel, with no math required. 245 views
Several scholars (especially Philip Ewell) have recently advocated decentering classical music re... more Several scholars (especially Philip Ewell) have recently advocated decentering classical music repertoire and analytical concepts in music theory, both to make the field more inclusive and to create more diverse and robust student outcomes. This paper summarizes basic concepts from jazz theory, and presents two new concepts "reverse extension" and "extension-related family of chords" to analyze harmony in Drake. I also include a set of teaching materials for harmony in contemporary R&B to help music theory teachers include more of this music in their classes.
Edit: an article based on this talk has been published in Current Musicology 109/110 (2023). See the articles section of my Academia.edu page. 622 views
Conference Presentations by Stephen S Hudson
This paper explores embodied experiences of “metrical constructedness” (Bowman 2003), using a new... more This paper explores embodied experiences of “metrical constructedness” (Bowman 2003), using a new theoretical tool called “motional conceptual models” to analyze the motion experienced in progressive rock’s riffs. Prog rock/metal is often associated with “mathematical” complexity of odd time signatures and polyrhythms. But this complexity rhetoric leaves some mysteries, including: the use of such rhythms by non-prog bands; or Meshuggah’s claim that “there is no mathematical approach” in their music; or online arguments about whether Metallica’s …And Justice For All (AJFA, 1988) is “prog-influenced,” when the album is mostly in duple meter and contains few polyrhythms.
Riffs are not just sequences of notes, but motions experienced by performers and listeners (Fast 2001). My “motional conceptual models” represent one experience of a riff’s motion, framing that shape as a prototype category to explain how it can be recognized despite variations (see “conceptual models,” Zbikowski 2002). These “motional conceptual models” show how manipulations of riffs can lead to manipulated perceived motion—providing a unified theory for “ABAC Additive Metrical Process” in Dream Theater (McCandless 2013), truncated riffs by Meshuggah (Pieslak 2007), Meshuggah riffs that begin “in media res” (Lucas 2018), and riff fragmentations I observe in Metallica’s AJFA. Changes in riff shape can thus be perceived as interrupting the normal looping of meter, and this impression of artificial intervention is one possible explanation for Bowman's “constructedness.” This embodied cognition approach to riffs also demonstrates how it is possible to write rhythmically “progressive” rock and metal rhythms by feel, with no math required.
This paper examines the movement patterns, aesthetic values, and social meanings that constitute ... more This paper examines the movement patterns, aesthetic values, and social meanings that constitute headbanging practice in heavy metal culture. The author demonstrates that headbanging is a progressive exaggeration of a few movements seen in earlier African American music styles of rock and blues. The rhythm styles of metal music, the motions of headbanging, and embodied feelings of meter and groove cannot be analyzed separately. These components together form a culture of rhythm that is the most significant legacy of African American culture in metal music today.
Articles by Stephen S Hudson
Music Theory Online, 2025
This arIcle synthesizes concepts from studies of harmony in popular music to create a new theory ... more This arIcle synthesizes concepts from studies of harmony in popular music to create a new theory of pedals as mulI-layered sonoriIes with potenIally plural idenIIes and possibiliIes for percepIon, shedding new light on several paradoxes or ambiguiIes that pedals have presented within tradiIonal, triadic ontologies of harmony. Pedals historically have oNen been strongly associated with the bass voice, strictly separate from the chords above them, and usually understood as a harmonic prolongaIon of the tonic or dominant. But within popular music, pedals may appear in any voice, may parIcipate in every chord, and may not play a clear prolongaIonal role. We present a mulIparameter framework for understanding pedals, and observe two new types of pedal in popular music, the "senImental pedal" and "cinemaIc pedal." We also show how pop and jazz theories make it easier integrate pedal notes with the surrounding harmonies. Our analyses complicate the picture presented by the growing literature on harmonic divorce, showing how some pedal passages can be experienced as either a harmonic divorce or an integrated harmony. Finally, our concepIon of pedal is described as an enacIve cogniIon perspecIve, foregrounding the potenIal for listener agency and subjecIvity in the percepIon of these mulIlayered harmonies.
Metal Music Studies, 2026
Headbanging emerged within the highly racialized blues rock scene of the late 1960s. This iconic ... more Headbanging emerged within the highly racialized blues rock scene of the late 1960s. This iconic metal dance style continues to share some overt characteristics and underlying dynamics observed by scholars of Black dance. Specifically, headbanging appears to have emerged from White audiences' understanding of how one should move to Black music, and developed as an exaggeration of an earlier practice of nodding. The similarities between headbanging, nodding, and Black American vernacular dance are interpreted through Jane C. Desmond's (1997) dance-focused theories of appropriation and transformation. Metal's history is often described as a process of gradually leaving the blues behind, but headbanging is a legacy of blues and Blackness that remains central to the metal genre. This work serves as the first step in a broader project showing how racialized ideas at the emergence of heavy metal have been a foundational and enduring influence on the genre, not just a precursor.
The Routledge Handbook to Metal Music Composition: Evolution of Structure, Expression, and Production, 2025
Riffs are often described in terms of their propulsive rhythm, but they also create a sense of fo... more Riffs are often described in terms of their propulsive rhythm, but they also create a sense of forward motion through tonal momentum. This is especially true in "riff turnarounds," figures added after multiple repetitions of a riff to create additional momentum, which often demarcate sections within a song's form. One factor that contributes to this impression of momentum is when a listener recognizes a riff turnaround as a recurrence of a melodic motion they have heard before. This recognition of similarity allows a "transference" (Scotto 2019) of scale degree functions and tonal momentum from one song to another. Through this recognition and transference, each listener can hear echoes of older styles of blues, rock, and metal in newer music-even in styles like progressive metal which substantially depart from those traditions.
Current Musicology, 2023
Drake's music features both lyrics and harmonies that often appear multilayered, ambiguous, and c... more Drake's music features both lyrics and harmonies that often appear multilayered, ambiguous, and conflicted to listeners. Sometimes these multilayered harmonies are created through what I call "reverse extensions," where the bass line moves one or more thirds below the root of the chord in a fixed harmonic loop. A reverse extension can sometimes be heard as a "harmonic-bass divorce" (de Clercq 2019) in which the bass line moves independently from the harmonic layer. However, I argue that they often can also be heard as single integrated harmonies. These plural hearings draw on intra-and intertextual memory to create multilayered harmonic experiences which help evoke the conflicted and ambivalent feelings widely associated with Drake's music. I explain the plural identities of these chords by adapting elementary concepts from jazz theory, in which extended chords can be mimicked by or substituted with "slash chords" that add a bass note below the base triad; for example, G/A (G major triad with A in the bass, or AGBD) sounds like Am11 (ACEGBD), and each of these spellings can be heard as both G and Am. Relationships like this create an "extension-related family" of chords which often easily substitute for one another in chord progressions. I argue that by enumerating possibilities for chord substitutions, and plural hearings of extended chords, reverse extensions are an "enactive music theory" which frames chord identity as a hearing subjectively enacted by an individual, rather than an objective property inherent in "the music itself."
Metal Music Studies, 2023
This article builds on a new theory of metal song form (Hudson 2021) to show how different versio... more This article builds on a new theory of metal song form (Hudson 2021) to show how different versions of compound AABA form can carry narrative meaning, illustrated by analyses of a number of famous metal songs in mainstream (i.e., not underground/extreme) styles. First, I discuss how some songs about rituals use conventional compound AABA form such that the 'transformation' event of the ritual occurs during the song's B section, focusing on examples by Mercyful Fate and Ghost. Next, I show how several metal ballads use a shortened version of the conventional form (AAB) to depict a protagonist who loses control, getting 'stuck' at the same time as the form gets 'stuck' in the B section, focusing on examples by Metallica and Pantera. I end with a short analysis showing how aspects of these two established strategies are combined in a unique pairing of form and narrative in Iron Maiden's 'Run To The Hills'. As I analyze these songs, I explore how musical form can structure fans' participation in the music and shape their experiences of these songs' stories.
Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy, Dec 19, 2025
In this article, I discuss several ways in which keyboard pedagogy can be more inclusive. First, ... more In this article, I discuss several ways in which keyboard pedagogy can be more inclusive. First, curricula can include more popular and world music, which represents a greater diversity of music in the classroom, and also creates more familiar access points for students without prior classical training. Second, keyboard pedagogy can be framed to help students develop and pursue their own interests. Third, assessments can be structured in a way that gives students more agency and flexibility to improve at their own pace. I describe a weekly multi-level musicianship challenge format which implements these principles to create student-centered keyboard pedagogy.
Metal Music Studies, 2021
(no abstract printed) While it may be tempting to some listeners to hear the album Metallica (199... more (no abstract printed) While it may be tempting to some listeners to hear the album Metallica (1991) as watered-down metal and excise it from the genre, this album is not peripheral to metal music studies. Metallica’s ‘Black Album’ played a key role in creating a new archetype of American rock/metal music and masculinity. It may have had the most impact outside of the truest, most conservative, underground styles, but metal-influenced rock is just as important to the legacy and status of metal. Perhaps even more so given that some of these rock-oriented bands have larger audiences than any metal group. The album influenced the American alternative metal scene and metal bands now linked to the alt-right; both are part of the history and legacy of metal. Even if we as individual scholars or fans would not embrace either of these developments, we must devote more effort to examining them if we wish to understand metal’s evolving shape and place and influence in society.
Music Theory Online, Apr 1, 2021
This article presents a new framework for analyzing compound AABA form in heavy metal music, insp... more This article presents a new framework for analyzing compound AABA form in heavy metal music, inspired by normative theories of form in the Formenlehre tradition. A corpus study shows that a particular riff-based version of compound AABA, with a specific style of buildup intro (Attas 2015) and other characteristic features, is normative in mainstream styles of the metal genre. Within this norm, individual artists have their own strategies (Meyer 1989) for manifesting compound AABA form. These strategies afford stylistic distinctions between bands, so that differences in form can be said to signify aesthetic posing or social positioning—a different kind of signification than the programmatic or semantic communication that has been the focus of most existing music theory research in areas like topic theory or musical semiotics. This article concludes with an exploration of how these different formal strategies embody different qualities of physical movement or feelings of motion, arguing that in making stylistic distinctions and identifying with a particular subgenre or style, we imagine that these distinct ways of moving correlate with (sub)genre rhetoric and the physical stances of imagined communities of fans (Anderson 1983, Hill 2016).
Thesis by Stephen S Hudson
Musical meter is often described as an objective grid-like system of time-points that is created ... more Musical meter is often described as an objective grid-like system of time-points that is created by musical sounds. I define meter instead as any pattern of felt beats an individual listener chooses to hear, a physical and cognitive interpretation of the music that is (re-) created in the moment of listening. We construe meter through embodied metering practices: dance gestures, patterns of counting, or epistemologies of rhythmic motion. Many metering practices have conventional metering constructions, specific associations between sounding features, patterns of felt beats, and paths of motion through these beats. Drawing on concepts from cognitive science and performance studies, I explore how this embodied knowledge is constituted and applied in both planning of musical phrases by a performer, and in-time perception and cognition of musical rhythms by any listener or participant. Metering constructions and practices are often performed by and associated with certain communities and identities. I take a culturally-situated approach to meter and felt motion, studying traditions of embodied movement and bodily discipline including headbanging in heavy metal (Chapter 1), characteristic dance rhythm topics in non-dance concert music of the eighteenth century (Chapter 2), motivic manipulation and developing variation in late Romantic chamber music (Chapters 3 and 4), and prosody and speech gestures in operatic recitative (Chapter 5). Contrary to many existing theories of meter, I argue that our feelings of beat are not necessarily organized in cyclical grids, but are improvised on the spot by stitching together familiar motions. I also explore how movements often embody and perform aesthetic ideologies and cultural meanings, with these hermeneutic frameworks often shaping listeners’ choice of movements, their proprioception of their own movements, and their perception of the qualities of rhythm and motion in the music they are listening to.
Book Reviews by Stephen S Hudson
Metal Music Studies, 2025
A retrospective of Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music by Rob... more A retrospective of Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in
Heavy Metal Music by Robert Walser (1993), one of the first academic books written about heavy metal; subsequent metal research has often grown in complementary directions, emphasizing topics which Walser neglects while avoiding topics Walser discusses at length.
Journal of Music Theory, 2023
Double Review of two books: John Paul Ito Focal Impulse Theory: Musical Expression, Meter, and th... more Double Review of two books:
John Paul Ito
Focal Impulse Theory: Musical Expression, Meter, and the Body
Indiana University Press, 2020: 398 pp. ($80.00 hardcover, $25.00 paper)
Mariusz Kozak
Enacting Musical Time: The Bodily Experience of New Music
Oxford University Press, 2020: 324 pp. ($47.95 hardcover)
Intégral, 2022
https://www.esm.rochester.edu/integral/35-2022/hudson/ Mads Walther-Hansen's admirably short mon... more https://www.esm.rochester.edu/integral/35-2022/hudson/
Mads Walther-Hansen's admirably short monograph on cognitive metaphors for sound quality and timbre may not be filed under music theory, but lies just outside of a disciplinary boundary that is rapidly expanding towards it. This condensed theoretical text doesn't look like music theory traditionally has; it contains no score examples, it analyzes a corpus of technical and journalistic writing about music instead of patterns of pitch and duration, and it cites very few card-carrying members of SMT. It has been published by Oxford, but not under their Studies in Music Theory series-and yet, it is an important contribution to the field that resonates with recent trends, especially in embodied cognition and topic theory. In this review, I will examine how Walther-Hansen's book is compatible with established music-theory epistemologies, and propose ways in which aspects of his model could be adapted to make an even clearer fit for music theory's norms of systematicity and rigor. Finally, I will discuss the advantages and consequences of this field including more research that departs from its traditional methodologies, which have usually focused on segmentation and classification of patterns of notes in a score. Specifically, music theory must include more research like Walther-Hansen's work on cognitive metaphors if it is to describe listeners' musical intuitions and experiences with a substantial degree of completeness or veridicality.
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Videos by Stephen S Hudson
Many prog metal bands distance themselves from the uncommon time signatures often used to notate this music, insisting that these theoretical terms are after-the-fact analyses that do not represent how they composed or experienced the music themselves. By thinking of a riff as an embodied shape, and thinking of some of prog metal’s rhythmic complexities as manipulations of felt shape rather than numerical counting, I explained how it is possible to write rhythmically “progressive” rock and metal rhythms by feel, with no math required.
Edit: an article based on this talk has been published in Current Musicology 109/110 (2023). See the articles section of my Academia.edu page.
Conference Presentations by Stephen S Hudson
Riffs are not just sequences of notes, but motions experienced by performers and listeners (Fast 2001). My “motional conceptual models” represent one experience of a riff’s motion, framing that shape as a prototype category to explain how it can be recognized despite variations (see “conceptual models,” Zbikowski 2002). These “motional conceptual models” show how manipulations of riffs can lead to manipulated perceived motion—providing a unified theory for “ABAC Additive Metrical Process” in Dream Theater (McCandless 2013), truncated riffs by Meshuggah (Pieslak 2007), Meshuggah riffs that begin “in media res” (Lucas 2018), and riff fragmentations I observe in Metallica’s AJFA. Changes in riff shape can thus be perceived as interrupting the normal looping of meter, and this impression of artificial intervention is one possible explanation for Bowman's “constructedness.” This embodied cognition approach to riffs also demonstrates how it is possible to write rhythmically “progressive” rock and metal rhythms by feel, with no math required.
Articles by Stephen S Hudson
Thesis by Stephen S Hudson
Book Reviews by Stephen S Hudson
Heavy Metal Music by Robert Walser (1993), one of the first academic books written about heavy metal; subsequent metal research has often grown in complementary directions, emphasizing topics which Walser neglects while avoiding topics Walser discusses at length.
John Paul Ito
Focal Impulse Theory: Musical Expression, Meter, and the Body
Indiana University Press, 2020: 398 pp. ($80.00 hardcover, $25.00 paper)
Mariusz Kozak
Enacting Musical Time: The Bodily Experience of New Music
Oxford University Press, 2020: 324 pp. ($47.95 hardcover)
Mads Walther-Hansen's admirably short monograph on cognitive metaphors for sound quality and timbre may not be filed under music theory, but lies just outside of a disciplinary boundary that is rapidly expanding towards it. This condensed theoretical text doesn't look like music theory traditionally has; it contains no score examples, it analyzes a corpus of technical and journalistic writing about music instead of patterns of pitch and duration, and it cites very few card-carrying members of SMT. It has been published by Oxford, but not under their Studies in Music Theory series-and yet, it is an important contribution to the field that resonates with recent trends, especially in embodied cognition and topic theory. In this review, I will examine how Walther-Hansen's book is compatible with established music-theory epistemologies, and propose ways in which aspects of his model could be adapted to make an even clearer fit for music theory's norms of systematicity and rigor. Finally, I will discuss the advantages and consequences of this field including more research that departs from its traditional methodologies, which have usually focused on segmentation and classification of patterns of notes in a score. Specifically, music theory must include more research like Walther-Hansen's work on cognitive metaphors if it is to describe listeners' musical intuitions and experiences with a substantial degree of completeness or veridicality.