What are harmonics really? And what have they got to do with your voice?

By Selena, 21/11/2017, Category:Unlock your vocal potential

Enhance your vocal harmonics to make your voice much richer...

Well this is one of my favourite subjects. You often hear people talk about 'harmonics' but what are they really? In fact, in case you didn't know, they are the same thing as overtones. Before I explain what they are, I'll give you my picture of what they are: In a way, Harmonics are to a musical note what the colours of the rainbow are to white light.

But at the same time many other notes are sounding, (like the rainbow colours) although less strongly than the main note (which is like the white light)....., and those notes are always in a certain pattern, or relationship, to the main note. We hear these overtones, (they are called this because they are higher than the main note) in every musical sound we ever hear. - whether that is a sung tone, or a note on a piano, or a wooden spoon tapped on the side of a saucepan. They are like the fabric of vibration.

The really useful thing to know here is that when you sing, the way you use your mouth and body can either bring out the overtones, making your voice sound more 'colourful' or 'richer', or can damp down the overtones making the sound duller and less engaging to people's ears.

There are 15 overtones sounding above every main note and they occur in the pattern shown.

( I'd like to point out here that the reason that we can understand language is that every vowel we speak emphasises different harmonics, i.e they have specific patterns that enable our ears to distinguish them from each other. Amazing hey? See the diagram lower down which shows this.)

Anyway, 'How do I enhance the overtones for a richer voice?' I hear you ask. Well, the answer is that you need to enlarge the resonating space inside your mouth!

There are three basic ways to do this and I'm going to tell you the first of them here:

Smile when you sing! See if you can tune into a smile...

It's not what the outside of the mouth does that makes the difference...

Can you feel what's going on inside your mouth?

Can you feel your soft palate lifting up? That's what does it.

You're increasing the space inside your mouth so your voice can resonate more.

But what if it's a sad song? Then you might not want to smile!?

Well, whats amazing is that if you put on a sad facial expression, it does the same thing! It lifts the soft palate. So we've got it covered either way. Phew.

The other 2 ways of increasing your resonating space for enhancing the harmonics are a little bit more involved, and the good news is that I demonstrate this in a short video at :
Enhance your Voice with Singer's Gear
This stuff makes a huge difference to how bright, colourful, and ringing your voice is.

This image shows that each and every vowel has a different and distinct pattern of harmonics, which is created by how we form the vowel in our mouths. And that's how our ears recognise the variations that make up speech and song.

We can learn how to shape our mouths:

1. Both to give extra overall richness to our voices, which is what I've explained so far;
2. And in ways that enhance the distinctiveness of the vowels for more colourful singing, and to keep in tune with other singers in a choir.

Look out for my next blog post in this category to find out more about vowels, 'timbre' and harmonics... it's a case here of 'what you don't know, could really help you'!

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