Tuvan Throat Singers essays

Tuvan Throat Singers essays Throat singing is a unique method of singing, or vocal art in which a singer can simultaneously sing, creating two, sometimes three or four notes. This miraculous method of singing is exercised by a number of Asian tribes, and a rich tradition survives in Tuva. Located deep in Siberia surrounded by grasslands, forests and mountains, the presence of humans is rare, in fact the whole population numbers only 150,000. The people who occupy this land, seem to be one with nature, and have a deep heritage tied to the land. The Tuvan throat singers come from a nomadic herding culture in which men would spend hours even days alone on horseback with only their animals and nature to call on for company. It was through this loneliness and place in nature that throat singing was developed. It is a form of stylized storytelling where the music represents sounds of nature: running streams or birds for example. The act of throat singing is highly personal to the Tuvans, as they believe it con nects them closer to the spirit of nature. Throat singing is typically practiced by men because of a taboo placed against female throat singing, based on a belief that it caused infertility. In more recent times some younger women are beginning to practice throat singing. Referred to as Khoomei by the Tuvan natives, its origin still a bit of a mystery, its purpose was to reproduce the sounds of nature. Throat singing usually consists of one low, sustained fundamental pitch (comparing to the drone of a bagpipe) and a second pitch is much higher and more harmonic (similar to a flute or whistle type sound). This second, higher pitch is manipulated to represent the sounds of nature, and alters in pitch unlike the lower tone which stays relatively the same throughout a song. So one human voice is creating two or three separate tones at one time. People in western culture found this hard to believe; one person creating two separate tones, how can this b...