Acoustic Analysis of Voice Quality in Iron Maiden’s Songs

This paper studies the voice quality in high-pitched registers of Iron Maiden’s songs. The f0 range varied from 298 to 998 Hz. Three Iron Maiden’s songs were selected for analysis: Flight of Icarus , Run to the Hills , and The Number of the Beast . Two very high-register excerpts were selected from these songs, so as to verify Bruce Dickinson’s vocal strategies to sing. The acoustic analyses were run with the software VoiceSauce [13] that automatically extracted thirteen parameters of long-term measures (H1*, H1*H2*, H1*A3*, CPP, Energy, HNR5, HNR15, HNR25, HNR35, F1, F2, B1, B2), and Praat [24]. Results indicate that twelve voice quality parameters were capable of discriminating two broad categories of voice quality: “pre-scream” and “scream”. The only parameter that was not consistent for this discrimination was CPP.