The Secret of the Second Voice

by Teodor Auerbach from the weekly Ndelya

I heard about this puzzling phenomenon from an opera singer.

"You see one soloist," he said, "but you hear two voices simultaneously."
"But how?"
"I wish I knew..."
"Did you actually hear it yourself?”
"I certainly did! And I wasn't alone but sitting in a capacity- filled hall!"

My curiosity was aroused and I turned to a music scholar for an explanation. Konstantin Sakva told me some interesting facts.

"The second voice... It is what we call 'throat singing'. It really exists. I saw and heard such a singer at the 7th International Musical Congress, which was held in Moscow in the autumn of 1971. He was a shepherd from Tuva, who wore his national costume. He sang in two voices at one and the same time. His lower voice was very low and even-keyed, resembling the bagpipe s bourdon. One of the pipes produces a steady bass note while another plays a highly mobile high-pitched melody. In throat singing the lower voice is loud while the upper is heard clearly but very softly. The second voice has considerable range. The combination of these two voices produces a unique impression."

"Where do such singers come from?"
"In the Soviet Union — from Buryatia, Tuva, Bashkiria. The Bashkirs have a musical instrument called a kurai — a variety of the reed-pipe or the flute. Its sounds resemble throat singing. The lower voice has a humming quality while the upper is richly melodious.
"But that is an instrument... How can the human voice create such sounds?"
"Some folk singers, I think, can at will single out and intensify individual overtones which form part of the lower sounds."

The scholar later located and sent me the programme of the October 7, 1971 concert, which said in black and white: "What is known as 'throat singing' is an exceptional phenomenon It is met with in some areas of Tuva, Khakassia and Bashkiria. The singer produces two sounds at a time. He maintains the fundamental tone in the lower register while developing an involved melody in the higher. In the concert, this manner of singing is represented by samples of Tuvinian folklore. A variety of bivocal solo singing is represented by the Yakutian 'dyieretii yrya' style: the humming contains high-pitched sounds."

Samples of Tuvinian throat singing were demonstrated by the shepherd Oorzhak Khunashtaar ool.

For technical details Sakva advised me to apply the folklorist Lev Libedinsky, who wrote the book Bashkirian Folk Songs and Melodies. Here is what he said:

"What is known as uzlau or tamakkurai (throat-kurai) is the art of producing two sounds simultaneously in the bourdon-like bivocal form. Uzlau performers are extremely, few and far between.”
"Have you heard this singing yourself?"
"Yes, in Bashkiria in 1939. The performer was a 74-year-old kuraist named Yulmukhametov. He produced a low sound of unusual timbre while at the same time making his chest resonators sound, too. At last, a quiet tender trilling in a very high register filled the air. It seemed to defy the powers of the human voice. Yulmukhametov had begun to learn to sing as he did when he was 14. He said he had mastered it himself."
"Did you ask him how he did it?"
"The main thing, he said, was to obtain a dark sound from your chest."

A dark sound... rather dark and mysterious process even for a successful bivocal singer!

"I wondered what medicine had to say about it. I went to the surgeon Grigori Orlov, head of a laryngology department.
"What you say is extremely interesting," he told me. "Alas, there is no mention of this in medical books."

Then I met the composer Tikhon Khrennikov. "You presided over the 1971 congress, where a Tuvinian shepherd and a Bashki- rian singer demonstrated bivocal singing. How did it strike you?"

"Like all my colleagues who heard it, I was overwhelmed," said the composer. "It is an amazing phenomenon."
"Do professional vocalists ever do anything like it?"
"No. Not even in the areas where bivocal singers live. It is practised only by a few individuals — so rare is this variety of singing. It requires a colossal amount of voice training. Or rather, of the training of the singer's two voices."

A Village of Polyglots

Every inhabitant of the Moldavian village of Gavanosa, in the south-west of the Soviet Union, speaks a minimum of five tongues — a remarkable number even in multinational southern Moldavia. The people of Gavanosa are Moldavians, Russians, Gagauz, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Greeks... One humorist has advised them to learn Esperanto. But the villagers get along very nicely together and have no trouble communicating. They adopt each other's language, national traditions and culture.

From the magazine SOVIET UNION

Sputnik. №5 May 1974