ThroatSingingArticle - KAREN SHERLOCK THE THROAT SINGERS OF...

F
rom atop one of the rocky escarpments that criss-
cross the south Siberian grasslands and taiga forests
of Tuva, one’s first impression is of an unalloyed si-
lence as vast as the land itself. Gradually the ear habituates
to the absence of human activity. Silence dissolves into a
subtle symphony of buzzing, bleating, burbling, cheeping,
whistling
—
our onomatopoeic shorthand for the sounds of
insects, beasts, water, birds, wind. The polyphony unfolds
slowly, its colors and rhythms by turns damped and rever-
berant as they wash over the land’s shifting contours.
For the seminomadic herders who call Tuva home, the
soundscape inspires a form of music that mingles with these
ambient murmurings. Ringed by mountains, far from major
trade routes and overwhelmingly rural, Tuva is like a musi-
cal Olduvai Gorge
—
a living record of a protomusical world,
where natural and human-made sounds blend.
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 stylized to represent such sounds as the whistle
of a bird, the syncopated rhythms of a mountain stream or
the lilt of a cantering horse.
In the local languages, the general term for this singing is
khöömei or khoomii, from the Mongolian word for “throat.”
In English it is commonly referred to as throat-singing. Some
contemporary Western musicians also have mastered the
practice and call it overtone singing, harmonic singing or
harmonic chant. Such music is at once a part of an expres-
sive 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, and each of us
—
one a musical ethnographer (Levin), the other a composer
with an interest in extended vocal techniques (Edgerton)
—
has had to traverse the unfamiliar territory of the other.
Sound Mimesis
I
n Tuva, legends about the origins of throat-singing assert
that humankind learned to sing in such a way long ago.
The very first throat-singers, it is said, sought to duplicate
natural sounds whose timbres, or tonal colors, are rich in
harmonics, such as gurgling water and swishing winds. Al-
though the true genesis of throat-singing as practiced today is
obscure, Tuvan pastoral music is intimately connected to an
ancient tradition of animism, the belief that natural objects
and phenomena have souls or are inhabited by spirits.
According to Tuvan animism, the spirituality of mountains
and rivers is manifested not only through their physical shape
and location but also through the sounds they produce or can
80 Scientific American September 1999
The Throat-Singers of Tuva
VOICE OF A HORSE in Tuvan music, the igil
—
played here