Overtone Singing Merges the Traditional With The Modern: Natascha Nikeprelevic

Natascha Nikeprevelic is a walking, breathing, and living art piece. She has a mysterious ability to produce cutting-edge theatrical pieces which incorporate many different artistic forms that she self-produces - expressions from her body and voice are combined with video and digital situations.

What should impress you most about Natascha is her incredible singing voice. Her vocal cords, lungs, and throat come together to create a very odd musical instrument. She is an overtone singer - a rare bread of singers who’s sound has roots going back to old traditional herding cultures.

Natascha Nikeprelevic Overtone Singer and Performance Artist

Overtone Singing

Overtone singing, also known as throat singing or harmonic singing, is a way of tuning the mouth and vocal cords to match the natural resonance frequency of air passing from the lungs, through the vocal cords, and out between the lips to produce a vocalization that leverages the entire body, not just the acute sound producing organs.

Sound & Resonance

When the resonance frequency of an object is matched it becomes more activated. Think of the opera singer who sings a high C and shatters the wine glass using her voice. This vocal phenomenon is similar to Natascha’s overtone singing in that in both instances, the vocalists tune their musical notes to match the frequencies of other objects - the wine glass, and in this case, Natascha’s body. In Natascha’s sonic artwork, she is able to piggyback off of her body’s unique sonic configuration to produce a strong and almost unnaturally powerful sound.

The video below of Natascha is a good example of overtone singing. Listen closely, beyond the humming, for the subtle whistling sounds which are the overtones.

The body is the home of the voice. It springs from the body physically to enthuse it to move it in respect to its origin: to be music.

Overtone Singer Natascha Nikeprelevic

The Process

The process is more simply explained than done: the air passes through three resonant chambers before it is expelled: the larynx, the pharynx, and the mouth (in that order). These resonant chambers can be shaped to produce multiple harmonic frequencies at the same time which creates the incredibly strange and the surprisingly loud and long-distance traveling sound that is heard. In fact, the sound travels so well that Tuvan throat singing was developed by the traditional Tuvan herders to communicate over the vast and open landscapes of Siberia.

Face-to-Face Showdown

Inupiat family, Noatak, Alaska, 1930 photo from Wikipedia

Overtone singing is not a new style of singing. In addition to being a useful communication tool in the Tuvan cultures, it’s existed in traditional Inuit cultures in the Arctic regions as well. The Inuit throat singing game was traditionally played by Inuit women as entertainment while their men were away hunting. In the game, two women sing face-to-face, and the winner is the one who can sustain the longest without laughing! When their faces are very close and their lips almost touching, the women can use their opponents’ mouths as resonance chambers.

Odd, unique, and interesting. What do you think? Do you consider the voice to be a musical instrument?