Iannis Psallidakos
Overtone singing teacher · Vocal acoustics researcher · Certified voice instructor
The starting point
As a child in Greece, I wanted to sing. I wasn’t allowed to.
In music class, the teacher asked us to sing a phrase, one by one. My turn came. I opened my mouth. My voice must have stayed somewhere behind my lips. He didn’t like it. “Next.”
I was never included in a choir. Not at school, not anywhere. Not once.
So I found my own method: I pressed my face against the speakers of our stereo system, mouth an inch from the driver, and turned the volume all the way up. That way, nobody could hear me. At least, that’s what I believed.
Years later, after studying architecture, learning piano, violin (my family’s ears suffered), and various other instruments, I attended a workshop on sacred chants. It was 2013. Above the voices, at the center of the circle, harmonics began to draw a column of light, a light made of frequencies, startlingly clear.
That day, I understood two things. That sound was a world I wanted to inhabit. And that if it had taken me so long to enter it, perhaps it was so I could hold the door open for others.
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From architecture to acoustics
I trained as an architect at the National Technical University of Athens, the same school where Iannis Xenakis studied before me. In his work, a simple rule can generate a complex form, and a form can become a musical gesture. That way of thinking followed me into the voice: small, concrete adjustments can transform the entire sound landscape.
Music and architecture share the same core: organizing forms in space and time, with constraints, proportions, and internal coherence.
Photo credits: Karol Jarek
The voice and its transmission
In 2021 I earned my voice teaching certification (RNCP Level 6, recognized by the French state). I trained with Emmanuelle Trinquesse (Chant Voix et Corps), and with Kenneth Bozeman and Ian Howell in the field that has most deeply shaped my teaching: practical vocal acoustics.
Bozeman’s work on acoustic pedagogy (the systematic application of formant-harmonic interaction to voice training) gave me a framework for translating acoustic science into usable teaching tools. Howell’s research on the spectral envelope and vocal tone color offered a way to think about timbre with the same precision that musicians typically reserve for pitch and rhythm. Together, they convinced me that understanding resonance isn’t a luxury for voice teachers, it’s the foundation.
I also studied world polyphonic singing at the Philharmonie de Paris, the Buteyko breathing method, analytical Musicodrama with Xanthoula Dakovanou, and music therapy at the University of Athens (EKPA).
What these transmissions share is a single principle: listen before you correct.
I work with people who have never dared to sing, and with voice professionals (teachers, speech therapists, choir directors). I’ve led sound meditation and overtone singing workshops for autistic children, and collaborated with JMFrance to introduce harmonic singing in nine primary school classrooms, experiences that profoundly shaped my listening and my way of teaching.
I regularly present in academic and professional contexts: the “Beyond Vowels” conference at the AFPC pedagogical days in Versailles, guest lectures at the Department of Music at the University of Macedonia, the 4th International Congress on Voice (ARTience) in Athens, and co-teaching with the renowned vocalist Savina Yannatou at the Music Village international workshop.
Overtone singing
Producing two sounds with a single voice: overtone singing is what changed everything for me.
My first teacher was Johanni Curtet (ethnomusicologist, doctor in khöömii studies, and one of the rare Western researchers to have received direct transmission from Mongolian masters). He gave me the foundations: not just the technique, but the respect for what the practice carries. I then studied with Anna-Maria Hefele, Daïnouri Choque, and Iégor Reznikoff, each of whom opened a different dimension of the voice.
You can explain every harmonic through physics. That doesn’t diminish the wonder, it deepens it. Overtone singing invites me into the raw material of sound: a dive into the heart of vibration that also raises questions about language and the way our brain organizes frequencies.
In the lineage of Demetrio Stratos, I believe the voice is a territory of which we’ve explored only a fraction.
Deep listening - the root of the practice
There’s a question I return to often: what came first, the technique or the listening?
In every tradition where overtone singing developed independently (Tuva, Mongolia, Sardinia, South Africa) it emerged from people who spent long periods in close contact with their acoustic environment. Herders on the steppe, shepherds in stone valleys, women singing near rivers. They didn’t have spectrograms or acoustic theory. They had silence, attention, and time.
The vocal technique didn’t come from a method. It came from a quality of listening so deep that the voice began to mirror what the ear had learned to perceive.
This conviction was deepened by my encounter with Iégor Reznikoff (mathematician, philosopher, musicologist, and pioneer of archaeoacoustics). In the 1980s, Reznikoff discovered that the placement of paintings in prehistoric caves correlates with the acoustic qualities of those locations: our ancestors painted where the sound was most alive. He presented this finding to the French Academy of Sciences in 1987, and it has since been confirmed by researchers across Europe. His work on Romanesque resonance, ancient sacred chant, and what he calls “Sound Anthropology”, the study of the relationship between sound and the human being, bridges science and the sacred with a rigor I find deeply inspiring.
I attended only one workshop with him, but his voice still resonates in me. What Reznikoff showed me is that the connection between sound, space, and human consciousness is not a metaphor, it’s an observable, measurable, and very ancient reality.
I believe this matters for how we teach today. You can learn the positions, the shapes, the exercises, and they work. But if you also cultivate the listening that gave birth to the practice in the first place, something shifts. The technique stops being something you do to your voice and becomes something your voice does in response to what you hear.
This is the foundation of my Resonant S.E.L.F. approach, Soundscape, Embodiment, Listening, Focus. We begin with the environment, not the exercise. We open the ear before we shape the mouth. And we treat every sound (your drone, a bird outside the window), as information about resonance that your voice can learn from.
It’s not a rejection of cultural traditions. It’s a return to what made those traditions possible: the capacity to truly listen.
The research
I’m not a scientist by training. I’m a practitioner who asks questions — and lately, the questions have organized themselves into a research programme.
On overtone singing. In 2025, I published the “Flute in the Throat” hypothesis (Zenodo): a proposed vortex-acoustic lock-in mechanism to explain how harmonics emerge in overtone singing with such extraordinary precision. The paper has since been submitted to Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology — the journal that published Sundberg, Lindblom & Hefele’s 2021 work on Anna-Maria Hefele’s voice, which I cite directly. Collaborations are underway with researchers in acoustics and medical imaging to test its predictions, including MRI protocols.
On the brain. In 2026, I published “Overtone Singing as Natural Theta-Gamma Cross-Frequency Neuromodulation” (Zenodo). Building on Wolfgang Saus’s MEG findings that overtone-rich sound drives a pronounced theta-band response in the listener’s brain, I propose that the active practice may create conditions for enhanced theta-gamma coupling — a neural mechanism linked to working memory and potentially relevant to cognitive aging. If confirmed, this would place overtone singing among the few vocal practices with measurable neuroprotective potential.
On sacred vowels. A more recent line of work asks why certain vowel sequences appear, independently, in the chanted traditions of very different cultures. In “Pneumatic Sweep” (Zenodo), I compare the Greek vowel sequence ΑΕΗΙΟΥΩ of the Greek Magical Papyri with Japanese Futonorito kototama and Vedic AUM, arguing that these sequences trace a complete activation of the vocal tract’s formant space rather than a simple melodic contour. The companion paper, “Beyond AUM: The Acoustics of the Fourth Element” (Zenodo), documents what happens acoustically inside the nasal /m/ of AUM — a three-phase transformation including a pole-zero crossing that deeply attenuates F2, with a stable resonance anchor at ~1800 Hz that appears anatomically prepared rather than coincidental.
On pedagogy. I also published “Le triangle vocalique revisité” in the AFPC journal, a reflection on resonance and vowel perception at the intersection of pedagogy and acoustics.
A book is taking shape alongside all of this — Raw Listening — an attempt to bring this material to readers who don’t carry a spectrogram in their pocket.
Teaching, for me, is also admitting that I don’t know everything. Every voice I accompany teaches me something new.
Credentials & experience
- RNCP Level 6 certified voice instructor (French state-recognized diploma)
- Architecture degree, National Technical University of Athens (Polytechnic)
- Published researcher:
- “Flute in the Throat: A Vortex-Acoustic Lock-In Hypothesis for Overtone Singing”
- “Overtone Singing as Natural Theta–Gamma Cross-Frequency Neuromodulation”
- “The Formant Trajectory of the Greek Seven-Vowel Sequence: Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Rituals in the Papyri Graecae Magicae”
- “The Pneumatic Sweep: Formant Trajectories in Three Sacred Vowel Sequences”
- “Beyond AUM: The Acoustics of the Fourth Element”
- Speaker: AFPC pedagogical days (Versailles), University of Macedonia, 4th International Congress on Voice, ARTience (Athens)
- Performance: Little Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus (“Thēbae Desertae”)
- Teaching: Collaboration with Savina Yannatou (Music Village international workshop)
- Training and inspired by the work of: Johanni Curtet (ethnomusicologist, doctor in khöömii studies), Anna-Maria Hefele (overtone singing), Kenneth Bozeman (practical vocal acoustics), Ian Howell (spectral envelope and vocal tone color), Emmanuelle Trinquesse (Chant Voix et Corps), Daïnouri Choque (spectral listening), Iégor Reznikoff (sacred chant, archaeoacoustics)
- Buteyko breathing coach
- Certificate in Music Therapy (Theoretical and Practical Approaches), University of Athens
- World polyphonic singing (Philharmonie de Paris)
- ORCID: 0009-0004-2234-0476 · Academia.edu · Zenodo profile