Sarah King - McCoy - CH5

Summary: Frequencies and overtones either help or hinder singers, depending on how they are approached. Formants affect the overall quality of sound and you can cheat with them a little bit to produce a better sound.

Key words:
Fundamental frequency – the primary pitch (e.g. middle-C)
Overtones – additional frequencies present in a complex tone that are higher than Fundamental frequencies; in healthy voices all the overtones are harmonics (they fit into a fixed intervallic series above the pitch you are singing).
Public resonance – the resonance that you share with your listeners and results from enhancements to sounds as it travels through the hollow spaces in your vocal tracts. AKA free resonance due to the free vibration of air molecules within a hollow space.
Private resonance – the resonance that only you can hear within your body (unless someone puts an ear to your body while you’re singing…). AKA forced resonance due to a physical object vibrating together with the sound source (your vocal folds!).
Spectral tilt/falloff/roll-off/spectral slope – the characteristic of harmonics to lose strength as they get farther away from the starting pitch.
Formants – resonances of the vocal tract, the amplifier of sound…
Singer’s formant – a clustering of formants 3, 4, and 5, which are so close together they become a single OP formant; created by resonance at the level of the epilarynx.

Application: Understanding how overtones and formants work will help with adjusting my own production of sound.