[In case you've lost track of who is who, >> is Marc Gelfo, >>> is Marc Gelfo quoting Steve Freides, and > is Steve replying to Marc.] In a message dated 6/3/2006 7:47:58 PM Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>> Steve Freides wrote: >> > It is essentially impossible for a human being to distinguish those >> > overtones as individual pitches. (If we could, we would have a >> > completely different perception of sound than we do, and I believe >> > music as we now think of it would not exist.) >> >> This is very untrue. You can train yourself to hear >> individual harmonics. I can fluctuate between perceving a >> tone as a single entity and tone as a combination of >> overtones. It took me a lot of practice. >You are the first person I've heard of that has tried to teach themselves to >do this - I'm glad you are able to do it. I guess it's not impossible then, >but it certainly isn't the way most people, musicians or not, hear. If you sing a low sustained steady pitch (near the bottom of your voice range) and then keep changing the vowel without changing the pitch of the note you're singing, you will hear the overtones change over the fundamental (each vowel has its own characteristic timbre, so changing the vowels is sort of equivalent to feeding a musical tone through a band-pass filter and constantly changing the settings). Thirty-six years ago or so I heard a recording of a Stockhausen piece called (I believe) "Stimmung" which used this phenomenon as one of its basic compositional elements. It is also I believe the basis of at least one of the styles of singing known as "Tuvan Throat Singing." Emory Waters _______________________________________________ post: horn@music.memphis.edu unsubscribe or set options at http://music2.memphis.edu/mailman/options/horn/archive%40jab.org
