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.