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Book Cover
Streaming video

Title The song of harmonics / directed by Hugo Zemp
Published Watertown, MA : Documentary Educational Resources (DER), 1990, ©1989

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Description 1 online resource (40 min.)
Series Ethnographic video online, volume 2
Summary In the practice of overtone singing (called also bi-phonic singing), whose best known examples can be found in Mongolia and with the Tuva people of Southern Siberia, a single person sings what the audience perceives as two voices at the same time a low pitch with his vocal cords, and in addition, a high-pitched melody using harmonics (overtones) selected by modifying the volume of the mouth cavity. This documentary is not an ethnography filmed in location. It is partly an illustration of the results of former research, partly the very actual investigation on overtone singing carried out in Paris, in the Ethnomusicology Department of the Musée de l'Homme, during a workshop, during a concert of the Mongolian National Ensemble, and in the medical visualization department of a hospital. The central figure is Tran Quang Hai, a well-known musician specialized in Vietnamese music, a performer and researcher in overtone singing, who is there working with the filmmaker in the same research group. The initial idea was to explore new technologies allowing the visualization of music structure and performance. The film shows for the first time in real time and with synchronous sound how biphonic singing operates from the physiological as well as the acoustical point of view. While shooting the x-ray pictures of tongue movements and the spectral views of overtones, the filmmaker and his collaborators discovered for the first time -- like the viewer of the film -- how this unique vocal technique operates
Notes Title from resource description page (viewed Feb. 6, 2014)
Event Recorded in Paris in 1989
Notes This edition in Mongolian, French and English with English subtitles
Subject Ethnomusicology.
ethnomusicology.
Ethnomusicology.
Genre/Form Documentary films.
Nonfiction films.
Documentary films.
Nonfiction films.
Documentaires.
Films autres que de fiction.
Form Streaming video
Author Zemp, Hugo, film director.
Schwarz, Jean, 1939- interviewee (expression)
Besse, Francis, interviewee (expression)
Ganbold, Taravjav, interviewee (expression)
Avgaan, G. (Gėndėnpiliĭn), 1947- interviewee (expression)
Trân, Quang Hai, 1944- singer.
Documentary Educational Resources (Firm), publisher.