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Jim Cole's Harmonic Overtone Singing at Artwell
Artwell Gallery, 19 Water St. in Torrington is pleased to present Jim Cole's multilayered spacemusic and rhythmic acoustic improvisations, featuring harmonic overtone singing (wherein he sings two or more notes at once) on Saturday, February 15 at 8 p.m. Suggested donation is $8, and refreshments and door prizes will be offered.
Jim's debut CD Godspace, as well as his group Spectral Voices' albums Coalescence and Sky have won critical acclaim and worldwide airplay over the past five years. From a nearly motionless mouth come sounds that seem unlikely from either voice or instrument.
For centuries people in many parts of the world have developed harmonic singing traditions, and nowhere has it reached greater refinement than in central Asia. You may have heard the high whistling melodies, expressive warbles, and low croaking tones of Tuvan throat singers. Similar styles occur in Mongolia. Certain schools of Tibetan Buddhist monks practice a powerful, deep sacred chant. In the West, Michael Vetter, David Hykes and the Harmonic Choir, and others have been developing harmonic vocal styles for more than 25 years.
In 1991 Jim Cole began practicing harmonic singing after hearing recordings of Tibetan monks and the Harmonic Choir. Within a year he was turning people on to the wonder of harmonic singing, teaching others as he continued to learn, and gathering an ever-changing group around him. Asian throat singing was never really a public art, developed instead by solitary wandering herders communing with nature and by monks deep in meditation. Jim and his group likewise experienced the relaxation, inspiration, and focus that come from doing harmonic singing. As the group evolved into Spectral Voices, the singers became increasingly experimental, creating novel sounds and techniques, discovering the challenge and joys of totally improvised group work, and exploring the vast potential of the human voice.
Whenever a person sings a note, overtones (harmonics) naturally occur at fixed intervals above the fundamental tone. The specific combination of harmonics is what gives a particular voice or instrument its distinctive timbre. Through careful listening and subtle adjustments of the lips, tongue, jaw, soft palate, throat, and the rest of the vocal apparatus, harmonic singers isolate and emphasize chosen harmonics while suppressing others. This enables them to produce two (sometimes three or four) distinct tones at once. With practice and control, it becomes possible to harmonize with oneself. Another type of singing involves low (sometimes extremely low) notes that do not occur under normal conditions but can be produced at fixed intervals below the "normal" vocal fold fundamental.
Harmonic vocal techniques often seem mysterious because their effects are so extraordinary. Researchers have found that harmonic singers use their mouth and throat anatomy to create interconnected but distinct resonating chambers of varying sizes and shapes that alter the loudness and distribution of harmonics. Thus, much of Jim's (and Spectral Voices') music involves sculpting internal spaces to interact with outer spaces.
As Spectral Voices' musical ideas expanded, the search for special places eventually led to a hill in the woods where an empty 120-foot-tall steel cylinder (an abandoned water tower) became Spectral Voices' new home. The singers crawled through a small hatch into a cavernous space so reverberant that sounds lingered twenty to thirty seconds. A series of notes would hang in the air as a chord and a duo became a choir. Listening was necessarily heightened and sharpened in such an unfamiliar environment as musicians learned to use the tower as an instrument. Spectral Voices' CD's Coalescence and Sky were recorded in candlelit darkness using a stereo microphone with battery-powered digital tape recorder and without any electronic manipulation, studio overdubbing, or other artificial enhancements.
An important element in Jim's improvised music has been "playing the space"—using the water tower or some other resonant place as an instrument and adapting ideas to the acoustics of his surroundings. Instead of giving a purely acoustic performance at Artwell, Jim will re-create the ambience of the water tower with the help of an electronic reverberation unit, a looping device, microphones, an amplifier, and speakers. The goal is to immerse the listener in sound as if the audience were actually in the water tower. It is important to note that reverberation—whether it comes from an electronic device or from an acoustic space—enhances but does not create any of the harmonics you will hear. All the music (except when Jim does acoustic singing accompanied by guitar or tamboura) will be generated by his voice.
Artwell Gallery is a not-for-profit community arts organization whose membership includes an energetic and growing circle of artists and friends of the arts. For more info on upcoming events or how to become a member of Artwell, write to PO Box 571, Torrington, CT 06790, or call 860-482-5122.
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