VIDEO: POLYPHONIC OVERTONE SINGING
6 November 2014
This incredible video of polyphonic overtone singing is from German vocal artist Anna-Maria Hefele.
Polyphonic overtone singing is the almost super-human ability to be able to sing two notes individually with the same breathe. According to wiki “the singer manipulates the resonances (or formants) created as air travels from the lungs, past the vocal folds, and out of the lips to produce a melody.”
In the video below, Hefele shows her ability to scale higher notes upwards and the corresponding lower notes downwards, at the same time. The sound she creates for higher octaves is a kind of whistle, which she can scale to incredibly high notes. High enough to leave Queen drummer, Roger Taylor’s falsetto B♭ (in the fifth octave) within Bohemian Rhapsody, looking like it was squeezed out of an old car tyre. Albeit without the timbre.
This type of singing was first found in Southern Mongolia, where it’s called ‘Mongolian Throat Singing’ and the country is still the most prolific in performance. ‘Tibetan Buddhist Chanting’ is another genre of the singing that is still performed today. Traditional religious or cultural overtone singing was heard throughout ancient Asia, the Middle-East, northern parts of Europe, Africa and the Inuit’s of Canada.
If you’re interested in learning how to overtone sing yourself, then Youtube has a few tutorials on how to achieve it (here), along with a lot of other performances (here).
Here’s another video of Hefele performing Ritus, by Wolf Jansha and accompanied by the European Resonance Ensemble, SuperSonus:
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