From the September 1999 Scientific American Magazine | 2 comments

The Throat Singers of Tuva ( Preview )

Testing the limits of vocal ingenuity, throat-singers can create sounds unlike anything in ordinary speech and song--carrying two musical lines simultaneously, say, or harmonizing with a waterfall

By Theodore C. Levin and Michael E. Edgerton   

 
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From atop one of the rocky escarpments that crisscross the south Siberian grasslands and taiga forests of Tuva, one's first impression is of an unalloyed silence as vast as the land itself. Gradually the ear

habituates to the absence of human activity. Silence dissolves into a subtle symphony of buzzing, bleating, burbling, cheeping, whistling--our onomatopoeic

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