Overtone Singing

October 6, 2014 2:18 PM

Polyphonic overtone singing - Anna-Maria Hefele. "Overtone singing is a voice technique where it seems like one person sings two notes at the same time. You can sing the overtone scale on one fundamental. Another fundamental has its own overtone scale, so in order to have more overtones to sing nice melodies, you can use different fundamentals and change them while singing."

Hefele is part of SUPERSONUS - The European Resonance Ensemble. Here are two musical pieces in which she sings:

RITUS

Rosary Sonata 1

posted by homunculus (65 comments total)

Wow, otherworldly. Does one just decide one day to learn how to do this, or is it something that, like swimming at a competitive level or particularly difficult piano, you have to have pre-existing physical traits that help you to begin with?
posted by Mizu at 2:40 PM on October 6, 2014

Holy shit... it's Agnes/Perdita!
posted by kmz at 2:43 PM on October 6, 2014 [10 favorites]

The kind of singing I do (Western classical) is kind of exactly the opposite of this, where you're trained to meld the various overtones together to make one round rich sound, instead of splitting them out to make separate pitches. Based on my experience with that, I would think that the parallel would hold -- anybody can be trained to sing western-classical-style, but some people will naturally have voices better suited for it than others, right? I think the same is true here.

When singing in a group, though, we do sometimes get the overtones to sound IN THE ROOM rather than in our individual voices; when we lock two octaves perfectly in tune with a minimum of vibrato, we can get the fifth above to sound. I've been in other circumstances where we can get much more complex overtones to sound, to the point that it feels like chewing on tinfoil or like your speakers are about to go. But that's with fifty or a hundred singers, not one spectacular talent. This woman is amazing.
posted by KathrynT at 2:44 PM on October 6, 2014 [9 favorites]

Amazing. What musical tradition is this?
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 2:58 PM on October 6, 2014

I've previously encountered this technique among the Tuvan throat singers of Central Asia and Mongolia, but I don't know if that's its exclusive provenance.
posted by KathrynT at 3:04 PM on October 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

Tuvan, I think. At least partly.

If this interests you, I recommend the documentary Genghis Blues (trailer) about an American blues musician who taught himself Tuvan throat singing. It was the first time I had encountered overtone singing and it blew my mind.
posted by scottatdrake at 3:05 PM on October 6, 2014 [12 favorites]

Holy shit that is amazing and her voice sounds unreal. How is she doing all those cool, high-pitched licks? Heck, how is this even possible?
posted by marienbad at 3:10 PM on October 6, 2014

Does one just decide one day to learn how to do this

One in some cases decided one day to learn how to do this and then spend an hour or so absent-mindedly making weird low rumbling noises while gurning and doesn't really get anywhere, and then over the ensuing years is periodically reminded of it and returns for a short time to the rumbling-and-gurning process, all the while leaving one's wife wondering just what the hell is going on in here, but I'm not sure how universal that experience is.
posted by cortex at 3:18 PM on October 6, 2014 [33 favorites]

how is this even possible?

There is no Anna-Maria, only Zuul.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 3:19 PM on October 6, 2014 [5 favorites]

If this interests you, I recommend the documentary Genghis Blues (trailer yt ) about an American blues musician who taught himself Tuvan throat singing. It was the first time I had encountered overtone singing and it blew my mind.

Previously & previously.
posted by homunculus at 3:24 PM on October 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

Holy shit that is amazing and her voice sounds unreal. How is she doing all those cool, high-pitched licks? Heck, how is this even possible?

She's creating the fundamental pitch with her larynx, her vocal cords, the way anyone else would sing. But then she's using the muscles of her throat, pharynx, mouth, and face to shape the resonant spaces of her face and throw the fundamental pitch into them in such a way that they resonate with the overtones of the harmonic sequence. That's why the fundamental pitch sounds kind of like she's singing it on an "rrrrrrr" sound, because that kind of rhotic placement throws the sound up through the face instead of out through the mouth.
posted by KathrynT at 3:27 PM on October 6, 2014 [25 favorites]

This is great because it's the clearest example of polyphonic singing I've seen -- I've seen a lot of Tuvan singing folk music, but this simpler approach of showing the scales makes the overtones all come through much more clearly to me.
posted by chimaera at 3:28 PM on October 6, 2014 [5 favorites]

She's creating the fundamental pitch with her larynx, her vocal cords, the way anyone else would sing. But then she's using the muscles of her throat, pharynx, mouth, and face to shape the resonant spaces of her face and throw the fundamental pitch into them in such a way that they resonate with the overtones of the harmonic sequence.

Also she is a witch.
posted by The Bellman at 3:40 PM on October 6, 2014 [35 favorites]

I wonder if it makes the inside of her face tickle.
posted by Soulfather at 3:40 PM on October 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

humans are pretty awesome, sometimes
posted by mrjohnmuller at 3:43 PM on October 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

The simplest way to do overtone singing is to make the low rumbly sound in the back of your mouth and whistle at the same time. Once you've got that part down, everything else is just practice.

Note: Never in a month of lazy Sundays will you get as good as this woman.
posted by Kattullus at 3:48 PM on October 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

cortex: "Does one just decide one day to learn how to do this

One in some cases decided one day to learn how to do this and then spend an hour or so absent-mindedly making weird low rumbling noises while gurning and doesn't really get anywhere, and then over the ensuing years is periodically reminded of it and returns for a short time to the rumbling-and-gurning process, all the while leaving one's wife wondering just what the hell is going on in here, but I'm not sure how universal that experience is."

Well, that makes two of us, anyway.
posted by notsnot at 3:52 PM on October 6, 2014 [3 favorites]

Here's another video of Anna-Maria Hefele singing solo, first overtone and then normal.
posted by Kattullus at 3:52 PM on October 6, 2014 [7 favorites]

I saw a Tuvan ensemble about 25 years ago and was pretty damn impressed. The most mind-blowing technique to me was the one where they can somehow *suppress the fundamental tone* so that you only hear the overtone. It was like there was a little flute-player living in the guy's mouth.
The overtone scale for any given fundamental note is rather limited; Frau Hefele appears to have kicked things up a notch by doing the math to figure out how to generate any melody she wants by moving the fundamental around. Brava.
posted by uosuaq at 3:53 PM on October 6, 2014 [4 favorites]

So, when I watched those two pieces, I understood that Hefele was making odd expressions because she's using her face as a resonance chamber, but what's the excuse for the guy playing the nyckelharpa? (The Sonata is seriously beautiful, though.)
posted by gingerest at 3:58 PM on October 6, 2014

Conversation with wife:
"What if we start just requiring that all opera singers be able to sing two notes at one time? We could hire half as many singers and save on funding for the arts"
"Jake is this a pun setup, please don't-"
"We could call it ...shifting the overtone window"
"STOP"
"Religious fundamentalists love this one"
posted by jake at 4:22 PM on October 6, 2014 [32 favorites]

The Awakening of the Baroque Paintings (possibly nsfw)
posted by homunculus at 4:37 PM on October 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

She is a self-resonating analog filter... that just happens to be acoustic and not electronic.
posted by infinitewindow at 4:47 PM on October 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

Speaking of polyphony: Video: girls singing Georgian polyphonic music
posted by homunculus at 4:57 PM on October 6, 2014 [4 favorites]

Well, that makes two of us, anyway.

Three of us.
posted by barrett caulk at 5:00 PM on October 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

That's why the fundamental pitch sounds kind of like she's singing it on an "rrrrrrr" sound, because that kind of rhotic placement throws the sound up through the face instead of out through the mouth.

I was thinking about the rhotic use here too. It's an interesting rhotic she's got going on, sort of nasal rhotic thing, so I think you're right about pushing the sound up through the velum, but my other thought was that it also has something to do with the spectral quality of the rhotic. The /r/ sound basically causes the prominent lower formants to sort of crash down onto each other (you can easily see this on a spectogram, if you ever wonder what it looks like), so you get this effect with the r sound where the harmonics aren't as spread, which would make it easier to get less spectral artifacts on the fundamental which in turn would make it easier to isolate the higher harmonics. Just a theory.

Really cool, in any case. Clearer and more controlled than most of the tuvan throat singing I've seen.
posted by Lutoslawski at 5:15 PM on October 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

Demetrio Stratos would be proud.
posted by kenko at 5:26 PM on October 6, 2014

always wondered what happened to the David Lynch audition tapes
posted by Lipstick Thespian at 5:40 PM on October 6, 2014

nthing Genghis Blues. That doc was so good. And this of course leads to a YouTube rabbithole of throat-singing cover songs
posted by GrapeApiary at 5:47 PM on October 6, 2014

I'd like to see some kind of reality show where she does this in truckstops and rural diners.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 5:51 PM on October 6, 2014

Well, that makes two of us, anyway.
Three of us.

Four of us.
posted by zeek321 at 5:52 PM on October 6, 2014

Its really cool... and musical. and I enjoyed it... and yet... it reminded me of dragging a cat across a blackboard while rubbing your fingers across the top of a wine glass...

and I've never done that exactly before...
posted by Nanukthedog at 5:52 PM on October 6, 2014

One of the works which brought the technique of overtone singing broad attention in the West is 1983 album Hearing Solar Voices by the Harmonic Choir, founded by David Hykes in 1975. Hykes spent much time travelling the East finding different 'incarnations' of the style.
posted by Twang at 5:53 PM on October 6, 2014 [3 favorites]

It's like she's got a cutoff frquency knob and a resonance knob in her larynx.
posted by sourwookie at 6:03 PM on October 6, 2014 [5 favorites]

Similar, this fantastic hour-plus video of Huun-Huur-Tu live. Lots of different techniques in there, from more traditional vocals to various overtone techniques.
posted by xedrik at 6:09 PM on October 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

This is amazing. I wish we could also sing polyphonically.
posted by ageispolis at 6:15 PM on October 6, 2014

Neat! Very theremin-y... This was delivered to Facebook with nothing at all about how it actually works. Thanks KathrynT for your beautifully concise explanation of the physiology!
posted by batfish at 6:15 PM on October 6, 2014

I totally understand it in principle, but can't figure out how to actually do it

It's easier/works better in the shower, depending on how tolerant your spouse and family are. Practicing in the car is no fun unless your car runs at a different set of ill-begotten frequencies than mine.
posted by sneebler at 6:27 PM on October 6, 2014

I can do the sorta proto-overtone singing where you whistle and hum at the same time. It irritates everybody including myself.
posted by Confess, Fletch at 6:30 PM on October 6, 2014 [3 favorites]

> The simplest way to do overtone singing is

… to say the word “Oreo”. That little transition between the /re/ and the /o/? Pure - if very brief - overtone. Play with it a bit, lengthen it out, and feel how it sounds.

This is best tried out of earshot of other people, as they'll start thinking you've ingested a boatload of lab-grade psychedelics if you're sitting intently for hours saying /oreeeeeeeeooooreeeeeeeoreeeooo/.
posted by scruss at 6:31 PM on October 6, 2014 [13 favorites]

After the Anna-Maria Hefele video, all of the YouTube suggestions I got are related to Tuvan and other kinds of throat singing, except the Sean Hannity/Alex Jones clip about "Why You Should Refuse to be Microchipped."

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.
posted by sneebler at 6:37 PM on October 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

The ultimate composed work for overtone singing in the realm of post-war modernist German music would be "Stimmung" by Karlheinz Stockhausen. It's an amazing, deep, epic, curious, funny, absurd, and beautiful piece of music which is extremely difficult to perform and requires six extremely talented, accurate and powerful singers with endurance and concentration to spare. Since a performance of the piece has many open-ended variables, each ensemble needs to construct the piece and make it their own, within the works extremely detailed instructions and boundaries. Here are two excellent performances on youtube, to be listened to ideally on a good sound system or with headphones... in the dark.

Original recording from 1968

More recent, 1997 recording from Theatre of Voices
posted by ReeMonster at 7:02 PM on October 6, 2014 [7 favorites]

Scruss, that's really helpful. There's a bit in The Trip where Steve Coogan is showing Rob his impression of a sonar ping, and that, I think, is using the same mouth position as the /re/ /o/ transition.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 7:02 PM on October 6, 2014

The 2 songs in the OP sound heavily processed and I suspect Ms. Hefele's track is undergoing some electronic filtering to dampen her fundamental. The first video in the OP and the link by Kattullus are much more interesting re technique and what she is doing with her voice. I listen to a lot of this type of overtone singing (seconding David Hykes) and I've never heard the fundamental suppressed naturally like it is in those 2 tracks.

Learning to sing this way is like speaking - indeed all the vowels we speak or sing 'normally' are a combination of fundamental and overtones that our ear/brain has become accustomed to and processes subconsciously as a whole. The reason "rrrr" is used to overtone sing is because this semi-vowel has the lowest Primary overtone and is therefore the easiest to parse out when it's emphasized by the singer. If you know the overtone series you can hear it in her demonstrations: the lowest overtone possible above a fundamental is 1octave, the next is 1octave+5th, the next 2octave, and so on. The meat of this type of overtone singing is done around 3 octaves above the fundamental, which allows for some 3rds and 2nds. Coincidentally: outside the musical context, a fundamental with a primary overtone 2-3 octaves above sounds like an "R".

Once you train your brain to hear the human voice as a series of overlapping overtones you can hear it everywhere. Listen to the video Kattullus linked again: right around 5:42 she stops singing fake words and just phonates on what sounds at first to be "eeyayaya" etc but if you recalibrate and listen for really high tones you'll hear she's singing a countermelody there as well.
posted by smokysunday at 7:03 PM on October 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

My cat was extremely interested in the first linked video. Perhaps she has been watching it on her own time and the microchipping video is an example of her other interests.

Incidentally, I know two people who have taught themselves to be able to sing like this without any formal training. One has also taught his kids. Neither is anywhere near as good as this woman, but it shows it can be done.
posted by lollusc at 7:07 PM on October 6, 2014

Oh and also, an easy way to try some overtone singing:

- Find a pitch or a note that is in the most comfortable range of your voice, not too high and not too low, so that there is no straining on either end and you can hold the pitch clearly without rising or falling and for a long time.

- Use the word "Hero".. but sing the word in EXTREME SLOW MOTION, paying particular attention to the change from the EEEE, to the Rrrrr.. let your lips curve slowly as the change in mouth shape renders the letter change... and when you transition from RRRrrr to Ohhhh, make the O a bit nasal at first and slowly open into a full "O" sound, as round and deep in the belly as possible.

You'll have to do this a few times.. maybe even many times.. think of it as a meditation. And each time you do it, you use a full breath. Practice keeping the note you sing as even as possible, the only thing changing is the shape of your mouth and the change of the letters in the word "Hero."..

You may even be hearing some overtones in the first couple of tries, but the more you practice, you'll begin to realize how fine and exact your lip and mouth control can be. You'll begin to realize what subtle movements will help the overtones become more audible, and eventually you'll be able to make pinpoint overtone changes by moving your lip or your mouth a fraction of an inch.

There are other words you can try.. or you can create your own "gibberish" syllables, or letter transitions. Try the word "Wow..." But remember.. you have to slow down your pronunciation of the word to an almost comical level.

It works! Anyone can do this! I dare you to try it in mixed company.
posted by ReeMonster at 7:11 PM on October 6, 2014 [14 favorites]

After the Anna-Maria Hefele video, all of the YouTube suggestions I got are related to Tuvan and other kinds of throat singing, except the Sean Hannity/Alex Jones clip about "Why You Should Refuse to be Microchipped."

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.

The sound of her voice activates the microchip in your brain which forces you to vote for health care reform and gay marriage, obviously.
posted by homunculus at 7:21 PM on October 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

"Rosary Sonata" is just amazing. I loved watching them perform it. I couldn't decide if the music was from the 17th century or from the distant future whence the band hails. I can only imagine how good that would sound live. I know SUPERSONUS just formed this year, but why don't they have an album out already? I need more nyckelharpa! And her overtone singing is astonishing. Many thanks for this.
posted by the sobsister at 7:45 PM on October 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

1) this drove one of my cats bonkers.

2) my nine year old kid suggested anna-maria team up with mark mothersbaugh.

3) that whole "whitle while you hum" technique is something we did on my (horribly incompetent and seldom sober) intramural basketball team while guarding the ball. also, we had this awesome trick play where we would lay head to toe and log roll across the court while the other team was dribbling the ball down. we once lost a game 136-14.
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 7:48 PM on October 6, 2014 [11 favorites]

There are throat-singing traditions in Mongolia and Tibet, too. There's a guy in Hungary who has learned all three styles (Tuvan, as well), and, very impressed with his singing in a tribal-techno band (Korai Öröm), I went to see him about learning this stuff. (Miklós Paizs, and an example of his singing solo) He told me that it took him about 3 years to consolidate his technique and that during the first year, his vocal chords bled frequently. I gave up on the idea. Singing a few, not very loud but distinctly audible overtones over a fundamental is not that hard, though: sing the deepest note you can comfortably sustain, then move the back of the tongue back and up to slowly almost shut off the airway while tensing that general area up, and with luck, you'll hear an overtone. Making the airway even tighter will result in the pitch stepping up to the next overtone.
posted by holist at 8:49 PM on October 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

There's a free 'crash course' on the Tuvan varieties of overtone ('throat') singing in the wayback machine here. The core voice is very different from the Western overtone singing above.
posted by umbú at 8:58 PM on October 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

I love this to the core of my being. I also notice that there is not a lot of articulation available with this style. Not likely to be much in the way of lyrics. Just noting, not complaining. More of voice as instrument than voice as story teller. Which I'm fine with. Most people talk too much anyway.
posted by yesster at 10:28 PM on October 6, 2014

I met a guy who said he could do this but I think he was just talking out of both sides of his mouth.
So I am of two minds about this.
posted by twoleftfeet at 10:36 PM on October 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

The Next Big Thing (once you've mastered polyphony) is Rob Brydon's small man trapped in a box.

Have I got it right? Listen to this:

I'm a small man in a box.
posted by twoleftfeet at 10:54 PM on October 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

Back in 1996 I was a mime clown on a medical mission trip to Tuva. You see, it turns out there is this clause left over from Reagan (or Carter?) that gave free transocean shipping to any humanitarian supplies going to an ex or current Soviet country. All we had to do was cram a shipping full of pencils, imaging equipment, syringes, and aspirin and the US of A would ship it for free. Of course it took six to eight weeks but whatever. They would even figure out rail/trucks on the other end.

So we landed in Kyzyl after like 36 hours of travelling, and these folks they are obsessed with dairy. We land, we're all sweaty and fatigued and swooning and barfy from no sleep and they welcome us with open arms and bout 20 different kinds of curdled milk. Goat I think, maybe horse. This 6'2" Wisonconite redhead in the group plowed through it all, and the rest of us could barely look at it.

I was there as a clown - we performed at tuberculosis camps around Tuva to cheer up the kids, and I would get up as a little interstitial wordless gag, giant pants, facepaint, suspenders, and grab some little volunteers. My gag was pretending to fight with them and the real enemy was the suspenders, which would get surreptitiously attached to a kid, and then snap back and pop me, and i would pretend the kid had a mean jab. Then, balloon animals for everyone.

So one day we're in Kyzyl, standing out like early puberty, and we decide to walk around the downtown. We hear this crowd roaring and divine towards it. Stumble upon a stadium - I use the word loosely, it was more like a field surrounded by scaffolding covered with boards, like someone was doing window work on a 4-story building and then yanked the building right out of the middle - and we see there's a Tuvan wrestling match going on. It had to be, since we're in Tuva and they sure as hell aren't playing basketball.

Our whiteness (well non-Mongolian to be precise, several of us were actually of Asian descent) and giant cameras (no phones in those days) descended onto the pitch, and some luminaries came over and mistook us for journalists. So we're surrounded by thousands of screaming Tuvans cheering on their enthonged heros kicking each other in the shins around some flags and we're in the thick of it taking pictures like we're all from Nat Geo.

Halftime that day was, shitchyou not, the mighty and amazing Kongar-ol Ondar and his band of merry throat singers. We got all cozy with them and naturally invited them back to the hotel. They kindly offered us some throat singing lessons. So we got back to the hotel and Ondar (RIP) says that for us foreigners to really get into the groove vodka needs to be involved. Twist my arm. A couple shots later and I'm singing overtones under Ondar's tutelage. Nothing as amazing as Ms. Hefele here but it still impressed the locals.
posted by sciurine at 11:56 PM on October 6, 2014 [24 favorites]

I wonder if it makes the inside of her face tickle.

If you do it loud enough, yes it does.

meeeeooowwwww, whoinnnggggg
posted by flabdablet at 1:23 AM on October 7, 2014 [3 favorites]

Practising in the car can be a bit distracting for the other occupants. Best avoided if hitch hiking.
posted by asok at 1:32 AM on October 7, 2014

If you do overtone singing in the whistle register, the overtones are so energetic that you get an Einstein-Rosen bridge.
posted by Zerowensboring at 7:11 AM on October 7, 2014

The 2 songs in the OP sound heavily processed and I suspect Ms. Hefele's track is undergoing some electronic filtering

One of the early yt comments: Obviously fake, do you know how easy it is to edit sound into a video.

Cool! I've seen this same comment on a bunch of yt videos and a variety of other places. The other version is "What's the big deal, that's just autotuning," when it's clear that someone is entirely capable of producing that "effect" by sliding up to a pitch as part of their normal practice or tradition.

Is this a meme or something? I've listened to a couple of Ms. Hefele's tracks, and a bunch of Blues and other singers who have been accused of autotuning what sounds to me like pretty basic singing, and I honestly don't hear anything out of the ordinary. I've listened to lots of Tuvan and other ethnic musics, so I naturally wonder if people have been letting what they hear in Pop music influence their beliefs about what's possible.

(I'm not a singer, but I've spent quite a bit of time in recording studios playing for a range of projects. I've seen engineers do comping of tracks and tuning in post. Also my hearing isn't what it used to be.)
posted by sneebler at 7:56 AM on October 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

This should be in the upcoming "Finding Dory".
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:00 AM on October 7, 2014

Is this a meme or something?

She's certainly making those sounds; that's not studio trickery. Perhaps my use of "heavily" just reflects my own conceptions of "how music ought to be" - there is a disconnect created when a video is taken in the recording studio but the audio is from post-processing. If you're going to place the viewer next to the musicians as they create music, the audio ought to reflect what I would hear in that situation.

On RITUS, the jew's harp sounded more resonant that I would expect to hear sitting next to it (maybe add a little electronic reverb), and it sounded to me that Ms. Hefele's track might have undergone some EQ processing to suppress the <800 Hz range (where the fundamental would be). I say this because you can barely hear the fundamental she's singing while the primary overtone is very present, unlike in some of the other live performance videos.

It was unexpected because going into the videos I held the view that the "point" of overtone singing was clearly hearing both tones produced by the singer, but of course this needn't be the case.
posted by smokysunday at 10:10 AM on October 7, 2014

Kongar-ol Ondar, the great Tuvan throat singer mentioned by sciurine above, died at 51 of a cerebral hemorrhage, and I remember an obituary at that time noting that it wasn't his first, and that he'd been advised to stop throat singing but had not.

Seems plausible that it could possibly increase blood pressure in the brain, and I think I'd want a little more information about that before I dedicated my life to throat singing.

Also, throat singing is an element in Yoik, the traditional singing of the Saami, and I wouldn't be surprised if Anna-Maria Hefele could claim some ancestry there.
posted by jamjam at 10:28 AM on October 7, 2014

I don't think so smokysunday, firstly she changes the fundamental as part of her demonstration and secondly, as mentioned above, it is possible to suppress the fundamental down to practically inaudible levels as part of the technique of producing these sounds.
posted by asok at 1:54 AM on October 10, 2014

She's a witch!!

(I say this with totes respect!)
posted by eggkeeper at 8:23 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

Here's a radio interview with A-M Hefele where she does much the same thing as in the video, presumably without technical intervention. Find the "Listen" button and try to ignore the gushing interviewer.
posted by sneebler at 8:33 AM on October 18, 2014