Tuvan throat-singing began as imitation of the landscape’s sounds.

Evidence

The Tuvan tradition holds that throat-singing was learned from the land itself — herders alone on the steppe listening to and answering the sounds of the world: the wind moving over rock, the burble and ring of a mountain stream, the call of birds, the rumble of the river. A singer ‘becomes’ the landscape, holding a low drone like the earth while a high, whistling overtone dances like wind or water above it. — , A Year of World Stories, 11752

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s existing work on soundscapes and listening — the steppe as a keynote sound environment, echoing The Soundscape.
• SEED: Strong seed: a piece on ‘musical landscape’ — cultures that literally learned their music from place, including khöömei’s drone-and-overtone structure.