Teaching
I listen to the voice as an architect: before anything is corrected, something has to be understood.
Some teachers of overtone singing place great importance on cultural authenticity: learning within the living traditions of Mongolia or Tuva, through a lineage of transmission.
There is something deeply valuable in that. These traditions carry an intelligence of sound that has been refined, listened to, lived with, across generations.
→ Overtone singing and throat singing: what is the difference?
But what was there before there was anything to transmit?
Before there was a method, someone had to listen.
Perhaps it began with a way of being close to the world.
With wind moving through grass.
Water finding its way through stone.
Maybe the ear heard something first.
And the voice simply followed.
Listening is not an accessory to technique. It is the ground from which technique grows. It is what allows us to feel a resonance before we try to control it. To recognise a possibility before we give it a name. Tradition and science are not competing ways of understanding the voice. They are two ways of approaching something much older than either of them.
The tradition I inherited is Greek, not Mongolian. What I can teach is ways of deep listening, the acoustics and psychoacoustics that let you verify what you are hearing.
I use overtone singing to open the ear.
And once the ear has changed, everything else you sing begins to sound different.