"[H]is voice...[sounded] like two people speaking in unison"

[ayyub]

I have a question for y'all, brought on by something I read in a novel:

"Leng was the kind of person who stayed with you long after he was gone. And yet, you know, it was his voice I remember most. It was low, resonant, strongly accented, with the peculiar quality of sounding like two people speaking in unison." (The Cabinet of Curiosities, p.

What could this possibly mean, beyond the obvious (by which I mean, beyond "sounding like two people speaking in unison")? Is this a phenomenon, or is it just artistic imagination?

[Aurora Rossa]

What kind of novel? What was it called?

[ayyub]

http://www.amazon.com/The-Cabinet-Curio ... 446611239/

The authors are great researchers and don't often just make stuff up (though sometimes it's simplified for the wide audiences), but occasionally they do.

[tiramisu]

Welcome back, come visit in #isharia (sorcery.net).

Also, it sounds like it could be some Vietnamese tone?

[Miekko]

Even when unison, there can be differences in the distribution of energy at different frequencies. Voices aren't things that in usual use have harmonic overtones.

[Pthagnar]

have you never heard a recording where somebody has overdubbed their own voice on top of themselves singing? even if the two tracks are in unison, there is a different quality to to the sound because the overtones are never quite produced the same way twice; think of spectrographs and how the same word elicited twice can produce quite different traces

i don't think i've ever heard it notable in anybody's normal speaking voice, although of course some people have richer voices than others and it is a thing which can be trained to some degree, but it is more common in chanting or singing -- in popular music, ozzy osbourne's singing sometimes has a quality like this and of course it reaches an absurd level in tuvan throat-singing

NE: also consider sardinian chant which i think has something like one person singing the melody in a normal voice, and somebody else sings the same melody in unison but *pharyngealised*, or something like that. if somebody has a way of speaking intermediate between normal articulation and this state, strange overtones that are a sort of mixture of the two could be produced maybe?

[Miekko]

I've actually once heard two girls singing in unison in a way that sounded dissonant. It was quite strange.

[Herr Dunkel]

Huun Huur Tu-like phenomenon?

I remember some show about Tibetan/Tuvan throat singing, saying they had something like two overtones.

[Pthagnar]

Huun Huur Tu-like phenomenon?

I remember some show about Tibetan/Tuvan throat singing, saying they had something like two overtones.

right, it is like that except not taken to the FARTING MUSK OX / TWITTERING HUMMINGBIRD extremes of that

[Herr Dunkel]

HOLY FUCK XDD

[Pthagnar]

please be tranquil

[Miekko]

I don't quite see how you'd find a reasonable way of relating "two dissonant unisons" to "tuvan throat song".

Tuvan throat singing occurs when, using some techniques that are pretty cool, you amplify the amplitude of multiples of the fundamental.

Dissonant unisons happen when the overtones - that always are present in most ways of generating tones - are off related to the other voice's overtones in such a manner that a lot of critical bandwidths are hit.

E.g. if the basic pitch is 100hz, throat singing is about emphasizing naturally present pitches of 200hz, 300hz, 400hz, ...

Dissonance would occur when the naturally present pitches instead may be something like 100hz, 207hz, 302hz, 415hz for one and maybe 100hz, 200hz, 312hz, 400hz, ...
This mostly has to do with vowel quality afaict, as the human vowel qualities actually in part are created by such inharmonic spectras.

[Taernsietr]

Well, ayyud didn't exactly say which is the one in the novel, so it could be any of the two, Miekko.

I've seen people get freaked when an acquaintance of mine accidentally (don't ask me how) spoke in a manner similar to throat singing, in the sense his voice seemed to amplify two harmonics (is that the term?); their description was "he just spoke with two voices".

[Miekko]

Well, ayyud didn't exactly say which is the one in the novel, so it could be any of the two, Miekko.

I've seen people get freaked when an acquaintance of mine accidentally (don't ask me how) spoke in a manner similar to throat singing, in the sense his voice seemed to amplify two harmonics (is that the term?); their description was "he just spoke with two voices".

Well, if it's throat-singing-like, speaking in unison is not probably the effect people would compare it to.

[Pthagnar]

i don't think "unison" is being used in the music theoretic sense in the original, but just to mean "together"

[Taernsietr]

/\ WHS

[Pinetree]

I have a friend who can, in fact, push his voice in a weird way to make what he calls "the voice of many". It's really fucking creepy. it's like he recorded himself speaking the same line at three different pitches and played it back together, but i've heard him use it IRL, so it's not a recording.