Learn Overtone Singing
A Science-Based Approach

Most overtone singing instruction falls into one of three camps. Some teachers focus purely on technique: copy these shapes with your mouth, repeat until it works. Others emphasize cultural authenticity: learn it the way the Mongols do, in the direct lineage of the tradition. And others wrap it in mysticism: sound healing, chakras, sacred vibrations.

Each of these approaches carries something real. But each one, on its own, misses something essential.

Technique without understanding is imitation. Cultural form without the perceptual state that created it is reproduction. And mysticism without acoustic grounding is wishful thinking.

My work starts somewhere else: with listening.

The herders who developed khoomei in Mongolia didn’t begin with vocal exercises. They began by listening, to wind across the steppe, to water in river bends, to the overtones already present in the sounds around them. The vocal technique emerged from a deep, sustained attention to the acoustic environment. The cultural form was born from a perceptual capacity.

That perceptual capacity is what I teach. Before you learn to produce an overtone, you learn to hear one, not as a vowel, but as a frequency. I use spectrograms to make your voice visible. I use spectrograms to make your voice visible. I draw on published acoustic research to explain what your vocal tract actually does when an overtone appears. And I ground everything in the practice of deep listening, learning to hear what’s already there before you try to produce anything new.

Because the first time you hear your own harmonic melody, knowing the physics doesn’t make it any less extraordinary. And knowing how to listen makes it possible.