Subvocal

What is it

Subvocals, also known as undertones is what you hear when the voice breaks. It is a frequency below the fundamental, below the sound that the vocal chords are making. One of the most interesting things about the technique is that all harmonic frequencies double and when sung smoothly it just sounds so good! In classic opera singing it is shunned but in Mongolia and Tuva it is an accepted style that they call kargyraa. Buddhist monks make extensive use of undertones and in my opinion this is the most beautiful form. I am not aware that they have a specific name for their style. Tantric chant maybe? I don't' know.

Another try

Up till recently, I have done very little with these techniques. I found it very hard to sustain because my mind was too restless. This is also the reason the Buddhist monks are so good at it. It is more meditation than music. And then, when I tried it over a longer period, it got painful for my throat. I decided to leave it for what it is and concentrate on the overtones. I was not ready

Ready

I feel ready now. Not that my mind is at rest. I use the trick to only sing the undertones when they occur by themselves. This can happen after having sung for a while and my mind does indeed come to rest along with my breathing. Everything slows down. Then, when it happens, comes the hard part of ignoring my own surprise and keep my attention preferably very low to where my feet are. I listen and do not care whether I stay in the undertones or not. We become friends and have some fun reverberating. Until I drop out of the play and go on in other directions.  The tension on my throat, I keep light. This is what went wrong before, I applied too much tension and after a short while my throat started to ache. With light and very exact tension the throat does not suffer at all.

The Sound

So how does my technique sound like. The below YouTube clip is not my earliest try, but it is the longest time I could sustain the undertones and at the same time apply overtones as well. So I gave it the name: SubVocalisms.

SubVocalisms

In this clip I am taking my sweet time to reach the undertones. A beginning is made at 1:53 but my creaky friend is off again. However, at 4:30 we fool around for a bit and it is brilliant. But there is something funny about this clip isn't there? This is because it is the raw unedited sound whereas most of the time when I posgt a song on YouTube, I add a cathedral effect which makes the sound much more spacial. From 5:42 onward you can hear the cathedral version.

Small beginnings

This is definitely a keeper in my toolbox. I'm already dreaming (yes, literally dreaming) about making a full, long song in undertones. It may take a while since it is not the kind of technique you can force into sounding good. It takes a gentle approach. 

Going far means returning.

Learning by doing

I am not going to beat around the bush. You have to do a lot by yourself when you want to learn this skill. It is not like someone can show you how to place your fingers on the strings of a violin. Your instrument is inside of you! Your vocal chords, the soft palate, tongue, all the micro-movements are impossible to point at in a direct way. You can still get a grasp of what you have to do by looking and listening to an overtone singer and there are a lot of exercises. These exercises are the main thing in the beginning. Without them you are pretty much lost on how to make a start. When I first started, I thought I could find the overtones without a teacher, but after several somewhat frustrating months, I decided that it would be much quicker to find myself one. Who happened to live around the corner, lucky me: https://www.klankkleur.nl/

Erik knew all the ways, indirect ways, to learn the overtones and I soaked it up.

Beginnings

The very first exercises that I got from Erik that I can remember of, is that you had to choose a constant note that you could easily sustain and sing words as slowly as possible. You can basically choose any word, but some words are better than others for this. Good ones, to name a few, are "new", "museum" and "snow-white". The reason for their suitability lies in the movements that your formants (tongue, lips, soft palate etcetera) have to make when you move from consonant to vowel. When you pay very close attention you will notice that when you sing the word "new" you spout your lips until you make the vowel "u". When you pay even earlier attention, you will find that you start off with "i" directly after the "n".  These additional vowels (beside the "e") are there because of the shapes your mouth has to go through to form the consonants. In everyday speech we make these mouth movements very quickly, so we don't even hear this. Overtone singing makes it audible.

"Going on, means going far,

going far means returning". I remember this quote, probably from an ancient philosopher, written on the sleeve of one of the vinyl albums from Vangelis. I did not understand, because it lacked a crucial comma (that I inserted here) and thus it made no sense at all to me. Did the "on means" involve money or a technique and what are "far means"? Being affluent? What a riddle, it was baffling. Much later I realised that "means" was a verb and suddenly it all made sense. Phew!

To me, in the context of music, it means that you can go a long way in singing and make it very complicated but in the end you must return to the root, come full-circle. It all starts from there and it is where you will always find fresh inspiration. I still like to use words when I sing. It gives me something to hold on to when inspiration fails me and I don't know which direction to take. The word becomes the source for inspiration and it is never far but easily within mine and anybody's reach.

Low

I made use of this principle when I did my latest song /slash/ voice research project. I was curious how low I could sing the fundamental note and still be able to produce clear overtones.

"Low"

You can watch it in the spectrogram, the lowest line is the fundamental note. I got down to 65Hz (C2),  and could maybe have gone even lower but it would not have made sense any more. Maybe later. I found it hard but very rewarding to pay attention to the overtones. The harmonics however had a field day, around 16 right from the start and some very distinct. Forming an overtone melody is something else. But still, between 800 and 1500Hz, there is a faint but pretty distinctive melody. At 6:15 I change course and raise the pitch slightly. But that's not all, the sounds I hear remind me of the word "low" and so I start singing that. Of course in overtone fashion, very, very slowly and in a loose and roundabout way, not feeling restricted to just the "o". It is specifically because the word 'low" turns into the "w" consonant that makes the O sound extra low. It's the shape of the mouth that makes it so.  Compare "low" with "bother". It's not the same kind of "o", the shape of your mouth is different and it sounds higher. In this fashion I can make an "o", even when sung on a very low fundamental sound pretty high. Up to around 3100Hz which would be about a G7? So my voice here spans from C2 up to G7 or in frequencies, from 65Hz to 3100Hz. I am no expert in these matters, but I believe that is definitely more than 5 octaves. At the same time, that's right. The vocal chords produce the low fundamental but not the high note, that is an overtone.

Is there a limit?

The upward limit in hearing the overtone series, are our ears and the translating brain. Since the "o" ranks rather low in the overtone series there is still plenty of upward room. The "i" vowel or sound makes the highest overtones. The wider you stretch you lips sideways, the higher the i-pitch will be. For reference: most people, including me, can hear up to 11.000Hz, some even up to 18.000Hz. There is a lot of room for the overtones to swim in! In the end this all comes down to the indispensable bass, the fundamental note, The whole harmonic and overtone structure is built on it. But I don't want to frighten you. While certainly helpful, it is not needed to sing ultra-low to make a lot of overtones. Perhaps the most crucial thing, especially when starting to learn overtones, is to sing in a pitch that you can easily sustain. You can sing longer and it will definitely sound good.

Relax and keep it simple.

What's in a name?

Practical applications?

The meaning of great art is usually hidden. It should be, it has to speak to the subconscious. I feel that true art has a personal meaning for the person who is subjected to it. Art has practical application, it just isn't clear right from the onset. For sure, humanity needs the arts to grasp the bigger picture. Or so is my understanding.

I am taking you on a tour: have you ever thought about your given name? It is very personal but you had no control over it. Perhaps you are not called by the name you got at birth. It's shortened or "William" became "Bill" because it was more convenient. Some people change their name. I recall a lady who was called by the traditional name "Fokje", who at some point realised that it sounded very close to "fuck you". That's something else than Rose, given any other name (Shakespeare reference that I just had to cram into this post). When the name was given to her by her parents, the world was still large and the English/American language and culture had not penetrated all that much in the Netherlands. We live in a global world nowadays and especially the small Netherlands is heavily influenced by American culture and language. Gradually more and more people around her had this negative connotation with her name.  This was unbearable to her and she changed her name to one she liked. Good for her.

What's in your name?

Are you aware about how you feel about your name? Perhaps you have never given it any thought. Does it really matter you may think. I believe it does, because every time someone calls you by your name, it has an effect in the subconscious. One way to find out about it, is speaking your name out loud repeatedly and feel what it does to you. You could even sing your name.

AHA! So this is what I was leading up to? Yep. You can, or rather I can, sing names in overtone style! Sometimes I happen upon a name that sounds particularly well. A few days ago I saw an interesting post on twitter about noise pollution from someone I did not know. He lives in New York but his name is obviously not Anglo-Saxon. So what do you do when you are on twitter and you want people to pronounce your name correctly. Exactly, you write it phonetically in your bio so every time someone clicks on your name, they see how it is properly pronounced. I was stoked, I immediately realised: this name is beautiful when I sing it slowly, very slowly.

pronunciation overtone-style

What about my name.

Now it's getting personal. Singing a name can be a tough challenge. My own name Harry has two rr's in a row. You probably do not realize this when English is your first language, but in the Dutch language an R is almost as close to hell as our throat-gutting G. It completely breaks the name in two, so to speak. I go from a very open A where my mouth is wide open, to this fluttering tongue consonant and then I have to get my tongue sorted out again to make an I. Awkward really....

But don't get any ideas and start calling me Bob or John. As awkward as my name might be to pronounce, I do not feel bad about hearing it. When you think that I am in any way suggesting that everybody should change their names to one they like better, you are wrong. But when your name sounds like "fuck you"? Yeah, then you should.

Introduction

This is a love song.

Most of my songs are love songs. I am in love with the inner sounds, sometimes referred to as the sound of silence or the silence between the notes. A singing note is never clear, there is whole range of frequencies swinging along on the basic frequency, the fundamental note. It's often not noticed. Speaking and singing is usually done by quickly skipping from note to note not noticing the complexity of the soundscape of the voice. Overtone singing is all about slowing down, listening. Listen.

Throattickler

I have no idea how you, reader and listener, perceive this song. I have been singing overtones for many years and I am well versed in hearing a lot of the subtleties. And even so, it happens that I get surprised when listening back to my own recordings. The difficulty that one has to overcome is that we usually only hear the louder frequencies. For me as an overtone singer it is a challenge to make the overtones audible also for the unsuspecting music lover with a history of expectations about music. 

So what is going on?

For starters, this is one voice, no instruments. It is not recorded in a cathedral, this reverberating effect is added by me in post-production. My vocal chords produce an ongoing low drone (at 80Hz). This is called the fundamental note and all the other notes, audible and inaudible, are a reflection of this note. When you look in the spectrograph in the film, it is hard to make out the fundamenal, impossible even. The loudest parts are yellow, then red and finally dark blue, which is not audible. The fundamental is most of the time only red here, not even the loudest pitch. Above this 80Hz there is whole range of overtones swinging along but most people just hear this as one sound, closely connected to the fundamental. However, higher up, there is a bright yellow line and that is the high overtone melody.

That's not all....

In the hopes that I'm not overfeeding you with information right away.... it's more complicated, even when discounting all the frequencies just above the fundamental. I will show you.

four overtones

At about 10:30 into the song, the spectrum shows 5 yellow lines on top of each other. The fundamental and four overtones. Can one hear it? To be honest it is not all that clear. One tends to hear what stands out. One really has to make an effort to hear it. However this technique does present a richer overall  sound.

Singing several overtone melodies/drones at the same time has become my trade mark so to speak. I may dedicate another post to the inspiration to sing overtones in this style. It's a story in itself.

It was very hard to learn to sing this way, even harder than learning "normal" overtone singing. I had to keep track of several overtones in my head, control the formants separately (throat-tension, lips, tongue, soft palate), but at some point it became much easier and meanwhile it comes naturally and I can make actual songs in this uniquely personal style. Which is all I ever wanted.

Link to my Bandcamp site https://harrylieben.bandcamp.com/

Link to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoowXeC7NjdZ0LQZKwHOzgw?