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Polyphonic Overtone Singing Explained Visually With Spectrograms
New submitter Tucano writes The overtone singer Anna-Maria Hefele can sing two notes at the same time. In her latest video, spectrograms and frequency filters are used to explain how she can produce two melody lines at the same time, and how she uses her mouth to filter the frequencies of her voice. When the voice produces a sound, many harmonics (or overtones) sound at the same time, and we normally hear this as a single tone. In overtone singing, the mouth filters out all harmonics but one, and the one that remains is amplified to become louder. This is then perceived as a separate tone, next to the fundamental. In her video, Anna-Maria shows techniques that become increasingly advanced. She shows the overtone scale (steady fundamental, moving overtone), the undertone scale (steady overtone, moving fundamental), parallel movement and opposing movement of overtone and fundamental, and even complex compositions with two separate melody lines.
This has been around for a long time (think 1000s of years). I suspect this particular video became popular due to her attractiveness and plunging neckline. That's not to say she isn't amazingly talented though. She most certainly is!
I think if you sat down with one of these software packages for a few minutes you'd quickly realize that having a top notch performance is the key to a quality end-product. Think of it this way. If you're photographing a model would you rather spend a half-hour having makeup applied (maybe it takes longer, I don't know) or would you rather spend many hours airbrushing and PSing the shit out of the final image before you can even start working on stylizing it for print and doing the 'normal' PSing? Same goes for music. You can create vocals and instrumental music out of thin air with software, but it takes a TON of work to get them to not sound like crap, let alone good.