19.
Vowels and Formants III: Formants for fun and profit
(with
samples of exotic music)
Note:
This page has more information than can be comfortably handled in one sitting,
so be selective about which links you follow up on.
Harmonica
My
father Erwin used to play a mean (sense
11b) harmonica. When I was young, he'd sometimes entertain me by making
his harmonica "talk", imitating the famous talking harmonica piece,
"I Found My Mama", which we used to listen to on an old 78 RPM record.
By now you should know how this was done: formants. You form the sounds of what
you want to say in your mouth, then blow and draw notes on the harmonica. The
quality of the notes will be affected by the shape of your vocal tract (mostly
by F2, the formant space closest to the front of the mouth), so a harmonica
can seem to be "talking". It's not very understandable as speech unless
you know what to expect (it is after all missing the back and other formants),
but it is certainly amusing to listen to. Here's
a sample of a "talking (and laughing) harmonica" used in a Pepsi commercial
(source page).
You can also listen to various harmonica effects in this MP3 file of pieces
by "Mr. Harmonica"
Lonnie Glosson, especially in the "train" piece. By manipulating
the configurations of his vocal tract, the player changes the quality of the
harmonica's notes to imitate a train passing.
rm_files/PopTufTrain.mp3
Jew's harp
There are many other instruments in the world,
especially folk instruments, that make use of formants to produce their special
sound. One of the most famous is the Jew's harp. It's also been called the "jaw's
harp" or "jaw harp", apparently for reasons of political correctness.
But it seems it had nothing to do with 'Jews' or 'jaws' at all in the first
place; Webster's says it comes from the Dutch Jeugdtromp 'youth/child's
trumpet', though it's now called mondharp 'mouth harp' in Dutch. Here
are pictures and short descriptions of the Jew's harp; the second page gives
the word for Jew's harp in several languages:
http://www.music.vt.edu/musicdictionary/textj/Jewsharp.html
http://www.infoweb.co.nz/jews-harp
Go to the following page and click on 'Hroong
Jew's harp' from Vietnam for a more exotic kind of Jew's harp music. Also try
the 'Dav dav bamboo tuning fork', an instrument using the same principle to
produce its twangy sound.
http://www.folkways.si.edu/search/AlbumDetails.aspx?ID=2657#
The 'morsing' and 'morchang' of Rajasthan, India:
http://mouthmusic.com/trumps.htm
Many
other countries and cultures, e.g. Norway
(sample 2) and Japan
(source page)
have Jew's harp traditions. Here's another sample of Vietnamese Jew's harp,
the Tran Quang Hai,
accompanied by zither; two Finnish recordings, called The
Original Harpoon, and
Metsäpelto d, with violin accompaniment; another Norwegian recording,
called Jesus
Thou Sweet Companion; one from Oceania
(source
page); and a lovely Medieval piece on the Jew's harp (gimbarde) and medieval
fiddle (vièle) called Cantiga
de Santa Maria 361 (local file) by the
Ensemble Perceval (source
page).
Mouthbow
Buffy
Sainte-Marie, a Native American protest singer popular in the 60s and 70s,
uses the mouthbow in several of her songs. The mouthbow has a sound similar
to that of the Jew's harp, and it works in the same way. This site includes
instructions
on how to make your own mouthbow (though it was down on last check; you can
also try here). Here
are instructions on how to play it. Go to the following page on the Amazon site
and choose the songs "Cripple Creek" and "Ground Hog" to
hear Buffy accompany her singing on the mouthbow.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000000EB3/102-7267148-0659337
A new (2005) CD of mouthbow music by salmon fisherman
and folk musician John Palmes from Juneau, Alaska, has since come out - in fact
inspired by Buffy Sainte-Marie's "Ground Hog"; here is an NPR report
on Mouth Bow: Small Voices:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4534703
If Jew's harp and mouthbow music is your kind
of thing, try some of these MP3 and .wav files. A Google search will direct
you to additional interesting sites.
http://www.mouthmusic.com/audio/MP3index.htm
http://www.oddtones.com/MP3indx.htm
http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/jmnasim
http://www.jewsharpguild.org/Audio/useraudio/Andrew_ButlerDec2006a.htm
http://www.noteworthyjohn.com/mouthbow.htm
Nose flute
You
may want to play around with this inexpensive formant instrument: the nose flute,
available in US music stores for about 99¢. You breathe into it with your
nose, and it shunts the air through a narrow passageway into your mouth, which
you form into notes as though whistling, and you hear a clean-sounding whistle!
Here's a snippet from "New
Progression for Nose Flute".
http://mouthmusic.com/humanato.htm
Didgeridoo
A relatively high-profile native instrument that
uses formants is the Australian didgeridoo (you may see many other spellings
of this word). It is a long, stout tube (the far end rests on the ground in
front of the player) into which the performer blows, while manipulating formants
to alter the sound. Some modern rock groups have incorporated the didgeridoo
into their compositions. There are quite a few Web sites devoted to the didgeridoo;
the first page below gives you samples of the sound of different didgeridoos;
the second has audio clips from didgeridoo CDs, some with singing; the third
offers a tutorial in didgeridoo techniques!
1. http://www.referencetable.net/dance/downunder/
2. http://www.garma.telstra.com/merchandise.htm
3. http://timelessproductions.com/didjeridoo/tutorial/
Here, from the Vocal Tract Visualization Lab of
the Dental School of the University of Maryland Baltimore, is a fascinating
video of what goes on inside when playing the didgeridoo:
http://speech.umaryland.edu/wierd.html
Tuvan throat singing
(Khoomei)
Formants
are exploited not only in talking and in instrumental music, but also in singing.
Of course we are hearing formants whenever a vowel sound is sung. But some national
groups have developed a method of singing a melody line (the fundamental frequency)
while at the same time producing a different melody at a higher
pitch with formants. The most famous of these are probably the Tuvans
of Tuva, Siberia in the former Soviet Union. They have performed on tour worldwide,
so you may have heard of them. Their CDs are not too hard to find in music stores.
This article from the September 1999 issue of
Scientific American,
entitled "The Throat Singers of Tuva", will tell you all about khoomei,
or Tuvan throat singing (there is also a Mongolian version of this singing style
called xöömii):
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00080AA2-BA32-1C73-9B81809EC588EF21
This article features a physical explanation of
how formants work and how they are used in this special singing style (it's
a bit technical and hard to follow though):
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000D20E9-9DF6-1CD6-B4A8809EC588EEDF&pageNumber=1&catID=9
Here
is a menu of links to audio demonstrations of this remarkable 'double-voiced'
(and sometimes 'triple-voiced') singing to try out and enjoy. Listen carefully
to hear the higher-pitched formant melody line, superimposed on the tune produced
in the usual way we sing, i.e. with the vocal folds:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000D1ABF-B0C5-1CBC-B4A8809EC588EEDF&pageNumber=1&catID=9
If you want to find out more about Tuvan singing
and culture, here is a list of links to related sites:
http://khoomei.com/
http://www.scs-intl.com/cgi-bin/webzonetuva/zone.cgi?list
Xhosa and Californian
overtone singing
The Tuvans aren't the only ones who have developed
this style of singing. The first URL below links to a page on Wikipedia that
lists many of these traditions and styles, e.g. Xhosa
(go to this page for ); the second links to audio samples of Xhosa overtone
singing from Amazon.
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throat_singing
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/clipserve/B00004Y70I001001/0/103-8296197-2993418
It may be hard to believe, but there is even a
Californian style of throat singing! This page has some zip files of
throat singing by blind singer Paul Pena that you can download:
http://www.genghisblues.com/cd/index.html
Here are two more audio files of Californian throat
singing, "Midnight"
and "Ballad".
The Scientific American article mentions
that singer Arthur Miles used overtone singing instead of yodeling in his cowboy
songs!
Undertone singing
and more
Here are some interesting audio samples created/collected
by Brazilian engineer and musician Leonard Fuks, who received his Ph. D. from
the Kungl Tekniska Högskolan (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) in Stockholm,
Sweden, and now teaches at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Fuks
has studied undertone singing, which he believes is produced by vibration
of the false or ventricular folds, just above the vocal folds, at half the rate
of the vocal cords. This results in a tone one octave below the fundamental
frequency produced by the vocal folds. Overtones can be produced at the same
time. Explore this page for more information and audio links:
http://www.speech.kth.se/music/publications/leofuks/leosounds.html
Note
the Popeye the Sailor link!
This
page has ended up a lot longer than expected, and it's just scratched the surface
of overtone music. There's plenty more for you to discover through the Internet,
CDs, books, magazines and even travel. So formants are a lot more than just something
technical to get through in the phonetics textbook!
Learning
to segment – and even read! – spectrograms has for most of us been a
completely new but very exciting kind of challenge. The next page will tell you
more about spectrograms, what kind of information they contain, what this information
can be used for, and how to read them.
Next: Getting
into spectrograms: Some useful links
on to next page back index I index II home