That reminds me, I saw a video recently of a choir practice where they sang "brighter" and "darker" based on the conductor's hand position.
It was fascinating how the singers could control the brightness of their voice while holding the same note and frequency. When they went bright, it sounded closer to "eee" or "iii". When they went dark, it sounded like "uuu" and "ooo".
From that, I learned that the lyrics of a song, in particular the vowels, can be chosen consciously (or not) for their harmonic effect.
A lot of great music has been written with this in mind, I would highly recommend Stimmung, for six vocalists and six microphones, by Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Really the whole piece is created from a framework of phonetics, loose vowel sounds as well as names taken from the "magical of otherworldly" traditions of various cultures as well as words taken from the composer's own poetry.
Ooh nice. I'd heard of Stockhausen - attended a performance of his works once - but this is new to me. Very strange music with a wide range of harmonics produced by vocalizations of vowel sounds. Sometimes nasal, other times chant-like, machine-like, and even reminiscent of insects at night.
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That reminds me, I saw a video recently of a choir practice where they sang "brighter" and "darker" based on the conductor's hand position.
It was fascinating how the singers could control the brightness of their voice while holding the same note and frequency. When they went bright, it sounded closer to "eee" or "iii". When they went dark, it sounded like "uuu" and "ooo".
From that, I learned that the lyrics of a song, in particular the vowels, can be chosen consciously (or not) for their harmonic effect.
A lot of great music has been written with this in mind, I would highly recommend Stimmung, for six vocalists and six microphones, by Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Really the whole piece is created from a framework of phonetics, loose vowel sounds as well as names taken from the "magical of otherworldly" traditions of various cultures as well as words taken from the composer's own poetry.
Ooh nice. I'd heard of Stockhausen - attended a performance of his works once - but this is new to me. Very strange music with a wide range of harmonics produced by vocalizations of vowel sounds. Sometimes nasal, other times chant-like, machine-like, and even reminiscent of insects at night.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hPkJW95jsw
You may find this interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC9Qh709gas
EDIT: also this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdldD0-kEcc
You may also find this interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oxe4mlsQos&t=120s
Or maybe this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxMmaygEYP8
Thanks for sharing! Didn't know human voice can do this.
Reminds me of pink trombone.
https://dood.al/pinktrombone/
Funnily, this is how Hungarian appends suffixes at the end of the words. The "brightness" of the suffix has to match the brightness of the stem.
We'd call e/i/ö/ü "high" tone class while a (as in the word calm) / o / u "low" tone.