see example here. Are women also capable of exhibiting this odd, ultra-low-and-rumbly voice that is similarly far below their normal register?
Recordings I’ve heard of female Buddhists chanting do not sound as if they’re trying to do that. But some version of it should be possible.
When I lived in a zen buddhist monastery I tried to match pitch and it hurt my voice (I am a soprano with a lyric range). I should have just gone up an octave but at that time I was too sheeplike. It still would have been below my comfortable range.
Here’s a video from Mongolia of a women.
BTW, I love the throat singing stuff. My most magical memories in life was staying in Tibetan monastaries. Being awoken pre-dawn as long horns echoed the wake up call across the valley with stars overhead. Going into the monastery with row after row of monks sat crosslegged, weaving back and forth and throat chanting the Tibetan Buddhist prayers, steam rising from their closely cropped heads, the monastaries lit by hundreds of yak butter lamps, and then dawn slowly breaking. It was magical and spell binding.
Are you talking about the pitch of the fundamental (the low, raspy drone)? Because then it would be all the more difficult, if not impossible. I don’t know the power laws and other data in the sounding of the harmonic (and I’m not sure if I could apply the data correctly, anyway), but the whistle tones generated begin at the seventh overtone, four octaves above.
yep, the drone. I was young and stupid. In my recollection, it was not as low as the Tibetan drone, just in the baritone range somewhere. Long ago.
Ann Coulter could.
There are a bunch of different type of throat singing, and some of them use droning high notes instead of low notes. The average woman will have a higher voice than the average man, but they would still be able to create high and low harmonics with their own voices.
Women can clear their throats, right? From what the lady described, that seems to be all this is, letting your epiglottis vibrate, like you would for a low evil voice.
I used to do it, thinking I was singing bass.
Women can clear their throats, right? From what the lady described, that seems to be all this is, letting your epiglottis vibrate, like you would for a low evil voice.
I used to do it, thinking I was singing bass.
Also, canon.
Thanks for turning me on to this singing. However, the singing does not employ the excitation of overtones, the part of Tuvan (Mongolian) singing which is, in a way, its point: not the startling deep, raspy tone, but the startling, soft whistles that sound simultaneously (are part of, actually) with that deep tone.
The higher tones in Inuit singing are by a shortening of the vocal cords, as in common voice production, as explained in:
But see the woman in:
I’ll have to think about that.
“Low” or (“sub”) harmonics do not exist, unfortunately.
Women are anatomically capable of producing the kagra (the low-pitched grumbly throat-singing), and Tibetan nuns can perform the exact same chanting techniques as the monks.
Perhaps you mean lower or higher harmonics, in which case, sorry.
My ignorance has been fought, thank you.
There was an early string bass instrument that became obsolete centuries ago: the triangular tromba marina or ‘marine trumpet’. It had one string, and that string was played with bowed harmonics. It was called a trumpet because like the valveless trumpets of centuries ago, it played only the overtone series. So if this has any relevance to the OP question—well, if a stringed instrument can do all its playing on harmonics like valveless brass, why not a woman’s voice produce the overtone series same as men’s voices, all the more so, since they’re made on the same design and function, unlike brass and stringed instruments?