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This article presents a theoretical framework for understanding headbanging to metal music as an embodied practice of perception and offers several analyses to demonstrate how specific patterns serve as a common core of rhythmic patterning in the genre. Listeners express metal's flexible rhythmic style through headbanging, creating experiences of heaviness and community. This motion brings felt beats into existence, guided by what I call "metering constructions," familiar rhythmic/motional patterns that are both schematic knowledge of music and embodied practices of perception. I define metering constructions through theories of embodied meter and cognitive linguistics. Two constructions, the backbeat and the phrase-ending 332, are used throughout rock, but distinguished in metal by characteristic drum patterns and motional qualities. Headbangers thus create and perform their own beat interpretation, what I call a "patchwork quilt of recognized rhythms" stitched together in various orders and combinations—sometimes resembling regular isochronous meter, sometimes not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For over twenty years, music theory has tried to diversify with respect to race, yet the field today remains remarkably white, not only in the people who practice music theory but also in the race of the composers and theorists whose work music theory privileges. In this article, I offer a few explanations for why this is so. I posit a music-theoretical "white racial frame" that is structural and institutionalized, and argue that only through a deframing and reframing of this white racial frame will we begin to see positive racial changes in music theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]