Overtones and Spectographs

This week in Vocal Ped we covered pitch and timbre. In the past I've had a decent concept of what pitch and timbre was but once Dr. Hoffman covered overtones I was pretty lost. I don't think anyone can understand overtones until they hear them first hand due to it being such an abstract concept. It really makes one rethink their definition of pitch. But once you hear the piano strings echoing across octaves it all start to make sense.


Thursday we went over the spectrograph and it's usefulness in singing and teaching. I enjoy the functions of a spectrograph because you physically see what is going on with your voice. You can see the physical changes when you sing low or high larynx or with or without soft palette raised or what notes are weaker frequencies or not. It is a very helpful tool when trying to understand pitch and overtones and their relationships. Something that baffled even Dr. Hoffman was that when he sang vowel sounds, the higher frequencies all sounded like "e" so perhaps different vowels just live in different frequencies? That is the joy with spectrograph is all of the experiments with the voice you could us it for.

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