Overtone singing selects harmonics with sharp vocal-tract resonances to create melodies

Evidence

An extreme example of the human ability to use speech organs artistically is overtone singing (a.k.a. throat singing), where the vocal folds produce a low-pitched sound with relatively high-level harmonics. The vocal tract is then used to produce very sharp resonances, which selectively amplify some of the harmonics (Bloothooft et al., 1992). By changing the resonance frequencies, the singer creates melodies. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 632

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines overtone/throat singing’s acoustic mechanism: fixed vocal-fold pitch plus movable tract resonances picking out harmonics.
• CANDY: Fun fact: a throat singer keeps one low drone note while the melody is carried entirely by selectively amplified harmonics shaped with the mouth.
• XREF: Echoes the formant structure work earlier in the book and links to the soprano formant-tuning passage at 631 as the same principle pushed to extremes. — connects to: Singing is humanity’s most versatile instrument and a real research field — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 1332
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 632