Throat singers create melodies by shaping vocal-tract resonances
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
Category: Causal Relationships
- CANDY: Great light fact: overtone singing makes melody purely from resonance shaping, not pitch change.
- SHARE: Send to anyone into world music or acoustics — overtone singing is a pure formant-resonance phenomenon.
Related
- Overtone singing selects harmonics with sharp vocal-tract resonances to create melodies (similarity 0.96)
- Tuvan overtone singers merge formants to amplify single harmonics into a distinct second melody (similarity 0.80)
- Singing is humanity’s most versatile instrument and a real research field (similarity 0.80)
- Trained singers project an extra formant near 2800 Hz that cuts through orchestral sound (similarity 0.79)
- Musical instruments couple excitation to resonances; human speech does not (similarity 0.79)
- Singing is modeled as vocal-fold excitation filtered by a time-varying vocal tract (similarity 0.79)
- Singers change vocal pitch only via fold stiffness and vibrating mass (similarity 0.79)
- The singing voice reduces to a source plus a shapeable vocal-tract filter (similarity 0.79)
- The singing voice is the most versatile of all musical instruments (similarity 0.78)