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Comment by mcqueenjordan | Hacker News Reader

This is really cool. I used to do a lot of overtone ("harmonic") throat singing and playing with this tool reminded me of those days.

For anyone curious, vowels are mostly just how we perceive different harmonic distributions. Put differently, harmonics are the basis of what it means to pronounce a different vowel. The human voice is basically just a harmonic chord, with different distributions of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. harmonics.

e.g. https://www.open.edu/openlearn/health-sports-psychology/heal...

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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.

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

Thanks for sharing! Didn't know human voice can do this.

Or maybe this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxMmaygEYP8

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

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.

90 second video demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnC8I3d2MXQ

Lots of different notes present. Perfect 5th, major 2nd, major 3rd, major 7th are all found in the harmonic series. In addition there's some beautiful non-piano intervals, notably the 7th harmonic (slightly flat minor 7th) and the 11th harmonic (flat tri-tone)

Strictly speaking they're all non-piano intervals, just some are more non-piano than others. (Or you can retune your piano …)

Is this related to formants? I don’t actually know what that term means but I’ve heard it used in this context

As I understand it, the formant is the difference between the interval from the harmonic series, and the interval using whatever temperment you're in. Piano-notes are in equal temperment. String players, and some wind instruments allow you to play the "in-between" notes selectively (like a true major third, unlike the horrid thing a equal temperment produces) giving you a powerful emotional tool

I wouldn’t go as far as to say the major third from equal temperament is a horrid thing, but it sure doesn’t hit as well as a true major third

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