Janis Joplin was touted to me as a singer able to sing two notes at once. Her music has various instance of what I think is being referred to, such as the opening notes to “Cry Baby” from “Pearl.” The amazing sound that Janis utters has very unusual harmonics. If some voices approximate a perfect sine wave, with no harmonics, Janis’ occasionally looks more like a square or sawtooth wave. (Does anyone want to know more about the exact harmonic components of these waves? Probably not, but if so, see http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/audio/geowv.html.) These waveforms can be thought of as being comprised of the basic sine wave built up with related, higher-frequency waves called harmonics.
To illustrate harmonics, go to a bank and pick up one of those pens-on-a-chain, and negotiate with bank personnel until they let you disconnect it from it’s glued-down base to perform the following experiment. Do not just yank it off the counter and run, lest you suffer from fiduciary litigiousness.
OK, now pull the chain somewhat taut between your hands and swing it so that a tiny person could jump rope with it. Wheee. Think of that as the base frequency of that length of chain. Now through some fancy wrist work and delicate tension adjustment, you can probably get the chain into it’s first harmonic, so that you have what appear to be two little rope-jumping areas, each half the length of the chain, while the middle of the chain it motionless(actually, the chain is now holding an “S” shape as it revolves). Think of this as the first harmonic. The sufficiently dextrous, and those with longer pieces of chain will be able to create successively more curves in the chain, approximating higher harmonics.
You can do the same thing with a guitar string by plucking it while you lightly press on one of the spots that is relatively motionless for the harmonic–halfway along its length for the first harmonic, which sounds an octave higher than the base wave.
Vocal cords, at least some people’s vocal cords, can do this too (I’ve often wondered whether the high falsetto voice of yodelers and Tiny Tim isn’t just vocal cords working at that first harmonic level). The harmonics set up by TWO vocal cords provide more possibilities for complex harmonics. I strongly suspect these harmonics are being used by those said to be able to sing two notes at once.
I’ve only seen him once, but it certainly appeared that the Asian fellow who appears with Bela Fleck in a recent concert special on TV can sing at least 2 notes at once. Perhaps he was using a trick to make it seem as if he were doing so, in which case he’s still a pretty talented fellow.
I do not recall Janis Joplin’s being able to sing two notes simultaneously, though perhaps a fan could point to a spot on one of her albums? But it’s certainly true that a vocalist can sing with enough distortion to add very rich layers of harmonics, & perhaps that’s what the original poster has in mind–certainly that’s what’s going on in Joplin’s rough, powerful voice, modelled after the great blues vocalists.
Returning to Cecil’s original column: it is certainly possible for a vocalist to have sufficient control of such distortion to be able to sing two notes at once, without necessarily being an anatomical curiosity. Since Cecil’s original column, this has perhaps become more common, especially in the genre of music called “free improvisation” (which often prizes “extended” [i.e. nonstandard] instrumental and vocal technique). The singer Phil Minton is the acknowledged master of this, & I have a number of recordings on which he uses several techniques to produce two notes–controlled distortion, in some cases, & also (a topic discussed in another thread in this forum) throat-singing. I recently attended a concert by Minton & Roger Turner, in which the introducer, Martin Davidson, referred to him as “someone it gives me a sore throat even to listen to.”
Indeed it was. I’m surprised Cecil missed this reference. “Throat singing” is a specialty of Tannu Tuva (a country in the middle of Mongolia made semi-famous by physicist Richard Feynman and Ralph Leighton’s book “Tuva or Bust!”). There are several websites out there documenting the different styles of throat singing, one of which essentially sounds like humming and whistling simultaneously.
There’s a small sample of Kongar-Ol Ondar (the Tuvan superstar) on cnn.com.
In the 70’s, the Ann Arbor cable system carried a racy video with more or less undressed figure skaters called “Spice on Ice”. There were also a couple of comic acts, including a ventriloquist named Stu Scott; at the end of his act, he had two puppets “talking” to each other, and they performed a rendition of “Bye Bye Blackbird”–in which the two separate voices sang the refrain simultaneously! I’m sure it wasn’t a fake; you could see him straining to do it.
I’ve seen this guy perform a few times, and whilst I have never made a close inspection of his vocal chords, it sounds very much like he sings two tones together.
In fact it sounds so much like that, that I’m prepared to say that *he does[/i/ sing two tones together.
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I can sing two notes at the same time, but only one of the notes is actually from my vocal chords–the other is a harmonic of the vocal-chord note. I produce it by changing the shape of my mouth–the same thing you do when you whistle. I think Bobby McFerrin does it (not that I’m comparing myself with him, you understand). Basically, for those of you who care about the physics of the thing, your mouth is a resonant cavity (like an organ pipe). By changing the shape of it, you amplify different harmonics of whatever frequency your vocal chords are vibrating at. We all do this–we just call it “vowel sounds”. For example, you can look at the Fourier transform of someone singing a note: this is just a graph of the different frequencies that make up that note. An “ah” looks very different from an “ee”, because the overtones are present in different strengths. Well, singing overtones is just a more extreme case of this. Instead of singing an “ah” or “ee”, with all the overtones that are present, you distort your mouth to isolate just one of the overtones. Anybody can do this–try it yourself! Start with an “oo” (about as pure a sine wave as you can get; that is, you’re singing mostly the fundamental). Move your tongue backward and forward in your mouth, and you can get the first overtone (one octave above the fundamental) and second overtone (an octave and a fifth). I make almost an “r” to get the third overtone (two octaves) and an “ee” for the fourth overtone (??? hard to hear). It’s very bizarre. BTW, don’t think you’ll impress your friends with it, unless they’ve got really good ears–these are very subtle effects.