A friend sent me a link this week to a video which blew my mind… via my ears! I’ve often heard of ‘throat singing’, normally among musicians as the punchline to “Well, it’s not like you can just sing both notes, is it?”

Standard response? “Not unless you do Mongolian throat singing!”

I laughed, along with the other musicians, with only the vaguest idea of what that might be. This video I’m going to share below was the first time I’d actually seen and heard it for myself. Without further ado, check out Alexander Glenfield’s wonderful demonstration of different types of throat singing:

What Alexander is demonstrating in the video above is ‘Tuvan’ (i.e. from the Tuva region of Siberia) rather than Mongolian throat singing, but the principles are the same. Both are forms of what’s scientifically referred to as overtone singing.

Click to read the rest…

Following on from the previous quiz on Percussion Frequencies, we’re opening up a new quiz today: covering Frequency Bands and Harmonics.

Once you’ve got to grips with the starting material in the Frequency Fundamentals course, you should find you’re getting a good sense of where different frequencies lie in your hearing range. The second half of the course then introduces the 10 standard bands of frequencies used when analysing audio and making adjustments to the frequency balance:
Click to read the rest…

Up to this point in the series we’ve focused on characterising each sound with a single frequency representing its pitch. In today’s article we’ll consider the other frequencies present in musical sounds.

Compound frequencies, harmonics, blah blah blah!

Right?

No; actually in the real world, most sounds are made up of more than one frequency. We’ll forgo the actual full-on physics formula for sound creation, as that is way past our scope here…BUT…what IS of importance is that most sounds have a blend, or ratio, of multiple frequencies that resonate to create the sound that you hear. Hence the term ‘compound’ frequencies.

Harmonics

Now, speaking of this resonance business; all of the frequencies contained in a sound except for the main (‘fundamental’ or ‘dominant’) frequency are called harmonics. Usually, they are found at precise multiples of the main frequency. The pattern is this: Click to read the rest…