Oddities

Double Voice Without Overtone Singing

Techniques with Two Oral Sound Sources

If you combine lip vibration, as in the case of tuba playing, with the singing voice, then two-part effects are created, sometimes also three-part effects due to the formation of a combination tone.

I shared the artist suite with Döme at a didgerido festival in Israel. An unbelievable beatboxer who is constantly inventing new ideas. I was allowed to film him during this exercise, where he plays with lip and voice combinations in which he uses combination tone effects.

The American vocal artist Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the lip technique in his piece Drive with additional glottis basedrum.

The Australian comedian Jason Thompson uses a vibration between the cheek and the side tongue (Donald Duck voice) to create an additional tone.

The former bass and mouth percussionist of the Swingle Singers, Simon Grant, presents here a highly virtuosic version of Bach’s Badinerie from BWV 1067 with a technique in which he whistles and sings at the same time.

Multiphony Techniques

Biphony – the phenomenon that two frequencies originate simultaneously on the vocal cords – is really multiphone in contrast to overtone singing. So far I have not been able to find any works showing what is happening at the glottis.

Sometimes the technique is called diplophony in studies. Biphony and diplophony are sometimes used synonymously. But I support the definition of Nwka and Wirth (Nawka, Tadeus, and Gu? nter Wirth. Stimmstörungen: für Ärzte, Logopäden, Sprachheilpädagogen und Sprechwissenschaftler ; mit 30 Tabellen. Köln: Dt. Ärzte-Verl., 2008), according to which diplophony describes the phenomenon of Strohbass. The topic was discussed in detail at Fuks (Fuks, Leonardo. PhD Thesis in music acoustics: FROM AIR TO MUSIC – Acoustical, Physiological and Perceptual Aspects of Reed Wind Instrument Playing and Vocal-Ventricular Fold Phonation “. KTH, 1998.).

The Greek-Italian singer Demitrio Stratos has called his overtone singing diplophony. The topic was discussed in great detail at Fuks (Fuks, Leonardo. PhD Thesis in music acoustics: FROM AIR TO MUSIC – Acoustical, Physiological and Perceptual Aspects of Reed Wind Instrument Playing and Vocal-Ventricular Fold Phonation “. KTH, 1998.).

The Greek-Italian singer DEMITRIO STRATOS has called his overtone singing diplophony and triplophony. This is mainly the classical resonance technique of overtone singing and is therefore a third definition of the term.

Lalah Hathaway sings two simultaneous notes at different intervals (06:12) on the Snarky Puppy’s live DVD/CD – “Family Dinner – Volume One”: Two times major second, minor third and major third, matching the musical context. She can obviously control both tones separately.

In the sound analysis (Overtone Analyzer) you can see that the double tones produced by Lalah Hathaway contain almost no overtones of their own, they are almost sine waves. The intervals do not correspond to natural overtone intervals and are therefore harmoniously independent of each other.

Lalah Hathaway multiphonics

Mavis Poole (SWAN) even sings an excerpt from the famous flower duet from Léo Delibes Lakmé. Incredible!

The American jazz trombonist Ray Anderson performs the multiphone vocal technique to virtuoso highlights in “Comes Love” from his CD Wishbone (1991) (04:29). The funny previous scats are also worth listening!

Phil Minton, an experimental singer from England, interprets John Cage’s Mesostics with multiphonic technique from 6:23 min on.

This boy demonstrates that it is actually child’s play.

And here Matt Palmer and Matt Steele show how to practice this multiphone technique. They mistakenly call it polyphonic overtone singing. However, it is not overtone singing, but a multiphone vocal chord technique.

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