Among the many ways the pastoralists interact with and represent their aural environment, one stands out for its sheer ingenuity: a remarkable singing technique in which a single vocalist produces two distinct tones simultaneously. One tone is a low, sustained fundamental pitch, similar to the drone of a bagpipe. The second is a series of flutelike harmonics, which resonate high above the drone and may be musically stylised to represent such sounds as the whistle or a bird, the syncopated rhythms of a mountain stream, or the lilt of a cantering horse.

(Dan and Sun-duk’s note: We saw a performance of throat singing at the National Theatre, and it can often be seen on television, as well. It’s an incredibly strange and beautiful art, much stranger than the bagpipe mentioned above.)

There are different techniques of performing the hoomii ovetones, usign the nose, throat, chest, or abdomen. It is only performed by men, because it needs much physical strength, though there is no particular taboo against its use by women.

Some contemporary Western musicians also have mastered the practice and call it overtone singing or harmonic chant. Such music is at once a part of an expressive culture and an artifact of the acoustics of the human voice. Trying to understand both these aspects has been a challenge for Western students of music.

Among the pastoralists, emulating ambient sounds is as natural as speaking. Throat-singing is not taught formally (as music often is), but rather picked up, like a language. A large percentage of male herders can throat-sing, although not everyone is tuneful. A taboo against female throat-singers, based on a belief that it causes infertility, is gradually receding, and younger women are beginning to practice the technique as well. The popularity of throat-singing among Tuvan herders seems to have arisen from a coincidence of culture and geography: on the one hand, the animistic sensitivity to the subtleties of sound, especially its timbre, and on the other, the ability of reinforced harmonics to project over the broad open landscape of the steppe.

The most virtuosic practitioners of throat-singing are concentrated in Tuva (now officially called Tyva), an autonomous republic within Russia on its border with Mongolia, and in the surrounding Altai region, particularly western Mongolia. But vocally reinforced harmonics can also be heard in disparate parts of Central Asia. Among the Bashkirs, a Turkic-speaking people from the Ural Mountains, musicians sing melodies with breathy reinforced harmonics in a style called uzliau. Epic singers in Uzbekistan, Karakalpakstan, and Kazakstan itnroduce hints of reinforced harmonics in oral poetry, and certain forms of Tibetan Buddhist chant feature a single reinforced harmonic sustained over a fundamental pitch. Beyond Asia, the vocal overtones in traditional music is rare, but not unknown. It turns up, for example, in the singing of Xhosa women in South Africa, and, in an unusual case of musical improvisation, in the 1920s cowboy songs of Texan singer Arthur Miles, who substituted overtone singing for the customary yodeling.

The ways in which singers reinforce harmonics and the acoustical properties of these sounds were little documented until a decade ago, when Tuvan and Mongolian music began to reach a worldwide audience. Explaining the process is best done with the aid of a widely used model of the voice, the source-filter model. The source – the vocal folds – provides the raw sonic energy, which the filter – the vocal tract – shapes into vowels, consonants, and musical notes.

Two Voices

This additional source is another fascinating aspect of throat-singing. Singers draw on organs other than the vocal folds to generate a second raw sound, typically at what seems like an impossibly low pitch. Many such organs are available throughout the vocal tract.

Another cultural preference is for extended pauses between breaths of throat-singing. (These breaths may last as long as 30 seconds.) To a Western listener, the pauses seem unmusically long, impeding the flow of successive melodic phrases. But Tuvan and Mongolian musicians do not conceive of phrases as constituting a unitary piece of music. Rather, each phrase conveys an independent sonic image. The long pauses provide singers with time to listen to the ambient sounds and to formulate a response – as well as, of course, to catch their breath.

The stylistic variations all reflect the core aesthetic idea of sound mimesis. And throat-singing is just one means used by herder-hunters to interact with their natural acoustic environment. Tuvans employ a range of vocalisations to imitate the calls and cries of wild and domestic animals. They play such instruments as the ediski, a single reed designed to mimic a female musk deer; khirlee, a thin piece of wood that is spun like a propeller to emulate the sound of the wind; amyrga, a hunting horn used to approximate the mating call of a stag; and chadagan, a zither that sings in the wind when Tuvan herders place it on the roofs of their yurts. Players of the khomus, or Jew’s harp, recreate not only natural sounds, like that of moving or dripping water, but also human sounds, including speech itself. Good khomus players can encode texts that an experienced listener can decode.

Yet it is throat-singing that Tuvans recognise as the quintessential achievement of their mimesis, the revered element of an expressive language that begins where verbal language ends. For the herders, it expresses feelings of exultation and independence that words cannot.