Skip to main content

An MRI Shows How a Singer Sings Two Tones at Once (With the Music of Mozart and Brian Eno)

When people hear Anna-Maria Hefele sing, they wonder how she does it, and not just because of her impressive traditional chops. "While most of us struggle to voice one clear, distinct note," writes the Independent's Christopher Hooton, the polyphonic overtone singer Hefele "can sing two at once, and move them around in separate scales." Also known as "throat singing," this technique "allows her to establish a fundamental note and then move the overtone above it through different notes, creating an astounding, ethereal effect." With nothing more than what nature gave her, in other words, Hefele manages to achieve a vocal effect more striking than most anything heard as a result of even today's most complicated digital processes.

But what, exactly, is going on when she sings? These two videos, recorded with Hefele performing inside a magnetic resonance imaging machine at the Institute for Musician's Medicine at the University Medical Center Freiburg, shed light on the mechanics of polyphonic overdone singing. "What you see in this dynamic MRI-recording is the tongue movement in the vocal tract while doing overtone singing and normal singing," says the description.

"The positions of the tongue forms the resonance cavities which delete all not-wanted overtones in the sound of the voice at a certain point in time, and then amplify a single overtone that is left, which can be heard as a separate note above the fundamental." It has, in other words, as much to do with suppressing all the tones you don't want to sing as with emphasizing the ones you do. Hardly the easiest musical trick to pull off, much less inside an environment as unforgivingly noisy as an MRI machine.

But you can still learn the basic techniques, and from Hefele herself at that: previously here on Open Culture we've featured Hefele's own demonstration of and how-to lessons on overtone singing. No matter how well we ourselves learn to sing two notes at once, though, we'd nevertheless have little idea what's going on to let us make such sounds without these revealing MRI videos. (Others have similarly exposed the inner workings of beatboxing and opera singing.) The footage also underscores the respectable musical taste of Hefele herself or her collaborators in this research project, selecting as they have the musical examples of "Sehnsucht nach dem Frühlinge" by Hefele's countryman Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and "By This River" from singing advocate Brian Eno's classic LP Before and After Science — though you might call this an example of music made during science.

Related Content:

Musician Shows How to Sing Two Notes at Once in Mesmerizing Video

How to Sing Two Notes At Once (aka Polyphonic Overtone Singing): Lessons from Singer Anna-Maria Hefele

Scientific Study Reveals What Made Freddie Mercury’s Voice One of a Kind; Hear It in All of Its A Cappella Splendor

The Hu, a New Breakthrough Band from Mongolia, Plays Heavy Metal with Traditional Folk Instruments and Throat Singing

What Beatboxing and Opera Singing Look Like Inside an MRI Machine

Brian Eno Lists the Benefits of Singing: A Long Life, Increased Intelligence, and a Sound Civilization

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or Facebook.

 

An MRI Shows How a Singer Sings Two Tones at Once (With the Music of Mozart and Brian Eno) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/32FB0lO
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...
Post a Comment
Read more

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring   for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring  than anyone has before through a newly released  10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Drunk History Takes on the Father of Prohibition: The Ban on Alcohol in the U.S. Started 100 Years Ago This Month

There may be plenty of good reasons to restrict sales and limit promotion of alcohol. You can search the stats on traffic fatalities, liver disease, alcohol-related violence, etc. and you’ll find the term “epidemic” come up more than once. Yet even with all the dangers alcohol poses to public health and safety, its total prohibition has seemed “so hostile to Americans’ contemporary sensibilities of personal freedom,” writes Mark Lawrence Schrad at The New York Times , “that we struggle to comprehend how our ancestors could have possibly supported it.” Prohibition in the United States began 1oo years ago-- on January 17, 1920--and lasted through 1933. How did this happen? Demand, of course, persisted, but public support seemed widespread. Despite stories of thousands rushing bars and liquor stores on the evening of January 16, 1920 before the 18th Amendment banning alcohol nationwide went into effect, “the final triumph of prohibition was met with shrugs…. The United States had...
Post a Comment
Read more